If you were wondering why Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis isn’t moving more quickly in her case against former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, wonder no more. Today, according to Yahoo News, Willis’ office sent “target” letters to top GOP officials informing them of upcoming indictments for their roles in a fake elector scheme in the state.
According to Yahoo’s legal sources, the letters are going to state Sen. Burt Jones, the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor; state Sen. Brandon Beach; and David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.
Jones is running against attorney Charlie Bailey, a Democrat, who is wisely going for his Republican rival’s jugular, calling Jones’ role as a “fake” elector “un-American,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) reports.
RELATED STORY: Georgia GOP was fine with Trump’s fake elector scheme—until one of the fake electors ran for office
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“Burt Jones doesn’t get to decide whose votes count and whose votes don’t … When you step in and say, ‘I am the official elector of this state, and I am saying that Donald Trump won this state despite the law, despite the certification (of votes), we are saying this because we want it to be the case,’ there’s nothing more un-American, there’s nothing more unpatriotic than an action like that,” Bailey told the AJC.
Both Jones and Shafer were among the 16 Republicans who met in secret at the Georgia state Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, naming themselves illegally as electors, signing their names in declaration, and then sending the list of names to the National Archives.
According to The Washington Post, just one day before 16 fraudsters met to falsely certify that Trump won the 2020 presidential election, Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s operations director for Georgia elections, sent out an email asking them for their “complete discretion in this process,” adding, “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
The Dec. 13 email additionally instructed Trump’s electors to intentionally mislead security guards at the Georgia Capitol by telling them they had appointments with Beach and Jones.
Willis has said that she has not ruled out indicting Trump himself to testify.
In an interview with NBC News Willis said, "We’ll just have to see where the investigation leads us… I think that people thought that we came into this as some kind of game. This is not a game at all. What I am doing is very serious. It’s very important work. And we’re going to do our due diligence and making sure that we look at all aspects of the case.”
Yahoo News reports that Georgia prosecutors are concentrating on the secrecy of the electors’ meeting.
But what isn’t clear is how the “target” letters play into Willis’ overall investigation. She has two options, according to legal sources. One, she charges the fake electors with “false writing” as they filed fake documents alleging to be electors. Or two, she uses the false writing charge as a “predicate act” in order to net Trump in the larger scheme of tampering with an election as connected to his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, prodding him to “find” enough votes to flip the election results.
