Donald Trump Now Under Criminal Investigation in Georgia for His Effort to Overturn the Election

UPDATE (2/12/2021): On Wednesday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced that a criminal investigation has been opened into Trump's "attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia general election." Fulton County, Georgia—which has gone blue in all but two presidential elections since 1876—was a major target of Trump's effort to overturn the election results by lying about election fraud.

In a letter to multiple state officials, Willis asked that they preserve records of Trump's phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office previously announced it was conducting an "administrative" investigation into the call after complaints.

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In the 2020 presidential election this past November, the state of Georgia went blue for the first time since 1992, thanks to an unprecedented organizing movement in the state to register new Democratic voters.

As a result, Georgia became a prominent target of then-President Donald Trump's lies that Democrats coordinated widespread election fraud that tipped the race to Biden.

Trump's effort to overturn the results of the election put him at odds with a number of Republican local officials in the Peach state, most notably Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

As Raffensperger scrambled to combat the former President's lies and attacks on Georgia officials, Trump called Raffensperger and urged him to "find" votes, saying:

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state."

Throughout the recorded call, Trump berated Raffensperger and spouted long-debunked conspiracy theories in an effort to pressure the Secretary of State to drum up a victory for Trump despite the people's votes.

Now, with Trump out of office and banned from Twitter, Raffensperger's office is launching a probe into Trump's quest to undo Georgia's election results, with the damning call between Trump and Raffensperger a key part of the investigation.

The Secretary of State's office told the New York Times that the investigation is "fact-finding and administrative in nature," while a spokesman for the office told Reuters that "The Secretary of State's office investigates complaints it receives," and that any legal matters would be referred to the Attorney General's office.

Trump advisor Jason Miller railed against the investigation, saying that Raffensperger shouldn't have run for Secretary of State "if he didn't want to receive calls about the election."

Trump's critics say there's not much to investigate, as they believe the case is open-and-shut.

In addition to Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also contacted Raffensperger's office in a call that went unrecorded, pressuring the Secretary to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots on invented technicalities.

Graham has denied that the nature of his call was criminal, but others want this call to be investigated as well.

News of the investigation comes as the first week of Trump's Senate impeachment trial kicks off.