Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who, as former US President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, tried to help him turn around his 2020 re-election loss, was told Monday that he was a target in the criminal voter fraud investigation in the southern state of Georgia.
Attorney Robert Costello told US media that prosecutors in Atlanta, the state capital, told Giuliani’s lawyers that he was under investigation for his role in trying to reverse Trump’s narrow defeat in the state, the first time a Republican presidential candidate has lost the state since 1992.
Giuliani is scheduled to appear Wednesday before a special grand jury investigating weeks of efforts by Giuliani, Trump and others in late 2020 and early 2021 to overturn Trump’s 11,779-vote loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia. , a state in which 5 million votes were cast.
At one point, on January 2, 2021, Trump pleaded in a recorded phone call with the state’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” him one more vote than he needed to overcome Biden’s lead in Georgia.
Georgia was one of several political battleground states about which Trump made erroneous claims that vote-counting irregularities had cost him another four-year term in the White House.
As part of Trump’s effort in Georgia, Giuliani, in the weeks after the November 2020 election, spent hours before state legislative panels espousing false conspiracy theories about secret Democratic ballot suitcases and corrupt voting machines. Nationwide, judges had thrown out at least 60 Trump lawsuits alleging voter fraud.
When it suspended Giuliani’s law license last year, the New York state appeals court exposed much of his activity in Georgia on Trump’s behalf. The court said he had made “numerous false and misleading statements about the results of the Georgia presidential election.”
In one case, the court said Giuliani had falsely claimed that tens of thousands of underage teenagers had voted illegally in Georgia, even though an audit by Raffensperger’s office found that no one under the age of 18 had voted in the polls. 2020 elections.
Giuliani also played a key role among a group of Trump lawyers who pushed to appoint pro-Trump alternative lists of voters to replace pro-Biden officers in states where he defeated Trump.
In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes depends on its population, with the largest states having the most influence. Congress certified Biden’s eventual 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.
Giuliani’s attorney, Costello, said his client would likely invoke attorney-client privilege and refuse to answer questions about his dealings with Trump when he appears before the grand jury.
News that Giuliani was a target in the Atlanta investigation, led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, came the same day another Trump supporter, US Senator Lindsay Graham, lost his bid to prevent testify before the grand jury investigating allegations of voter fraud.
Willis has claimed that Graham made several phone calls to Raffensperger and his staff requesting that they reexamine some absentee ballots “to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.”
Graham’s attorneys say prosecutors have told him he is a witness in the proceedings, not a target. He is now set to testify on August 23.
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