“I didn’t find any evidence of mass voter fraud, but I did have concerns about the mail-in ballot systems in Georgia and other places. This is troubling for the country. We can’t criminalise senators for doing their job.”
A combination picture shows police booking mugshots of former US president Donald Trump and the 18 people indicted with him.Credit: Reuters
There was no recording of the phone call, so it was one man’s word against another – unlike Trump’s damning phone call where he asked Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win Georgia.
The newly unredacted report that was released on Friday nonetheless provides the clearest insight yet into the secret jury’s thinking as they probed for months whether Trump and his allies broke the law after losing the 2020 election.
The panel heard from 75 witnesses between June to December last year. In the end, Willis indicted 19 out of the 39 people named in the report, including Trump, his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, and justice department official Jeffrey Clark.
Meanwhile, as some of Trump’s co-defendants struggle to cover their legal bills, the former president hosted a $100,000-per-seat fundraising dinner for Giuliani at his Bedminister golf course in New Jersey on Thursday night (local time).
Ahead of the event, Giuliani’s son, Andrew, told local radio station WABC that the event was expected to raise more than $US1 million for his father and that Trump had committed to hosting a second event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, in coming months.
But even then, Andrew Giuliani said, “it won’t be enough to get through this”.
Giuliani was also found liable last month by a federal judge for failing to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit brought by two Georgia election poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.
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They claimed there were falsely accused of fraud by the now disgraced former New York mayor.
The case now edges towards a trial in Washington that could result in Giuliani being ordered to pay significant damages to the women, in addition to the tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees he has already being directed to pay in that case, as well as the new costs of the Georgia trial.
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