Extract from ABC News
It's been more than two months since Donald Trump formally announced his White House comeback bid in Palm Beach, Florida.
But the 76-year-old has so far kept a low profile compared with his previous presidential campaigns.
In lieu of helicopter rides for children and audacious mega-rallies, Mr Trump has held two traditional campaign events in early voting states with hundreds — rather than thousands — of attendees.
While the former president remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, his fixation on the 2020 election has turned off some deep-pocketed donors.
And his efforts to subvert the transfer of power after losing that election are at the centre of two of the four major criminal investigations looming over his candidacy.
Alongside an investigation into Mr Trump's alleged mishandling of classified materials, a special counsel at the Department of Justice (DOJ) is examining his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
But it could be his efforts to change the outcome of the election in Georgia, the swing state that flipped for President Joe Biden, that may prove the more pressing legal risk to his campaign.
The state prosecutor overseeing the two-year probe into possible election crimes says charges are "imminent" after a special grand jury wrapped up its investigation.
And legal experts say any indictments are likely to be aimed squarely at Mr Trump and his allies.
The phone call that triggered the Georgia probe
Fani Willis had yet to spend a day in her office as district attorney of Fulton County when Mr Trump made the phone call at the centre of the investigation that's made her a national figure in the United States.
Weeks after losing the 2020 presidential election, the then-president called fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's secretary of state, to push him to "find" enough votes to win the state.
"I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have," Mr Trump said during the January 2, 2021, call, which was recorded by Mr Raffensperger's office.
The tirade became the focal point of the January 6 committee's investigation into Mr Trump's efforts to strongarm Georgia election officials into reversing his loss in the state.
As votes were being processed in the days after the election, Mr Trump had bombarded them with angry tweets alleging voter fraud without evidence.
"Everyone knows that we won the state," he said on Twitter.
Meanwhile, his campaign team and allies were frantically filing state and federal lawsuits challenging his loss.
When two recounts affirmed Joe Biden's narrow win by a margin of roughly 12,000 votes, Mr Trump's pressure campaign only escalated.
That December, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared before Georgia's state legislature, falsely claiming the state's voting machines were corrupt and tens of thousands of absentee ballots had been illegally cast and counted.
Giuliani also told lawmakers to appoint a slate of fake electors friendly to Mr Trump to draft and sign false documents declaring him the winner — an idea the state's Republican governor Brian Kemp rejected as "unconstitutional".
Another of Mr Trump's lawyers, John Eastman, had already prepared a memo justifying the strategy, which targeted seven battleground states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The memo was circulated to the White House, Giuliani's legal team, and state legislators around the country.
It laid the groundwork for the plan to have then-vice-president Mike Pence refuse to certify the election results in Congress on January 6, which was later dismissed by a federal judge as "a coup in search of a legal theory".
During the call to Mr Raffensperger, Mr Trump cited several of the same election fraud conspiracy theories, which by then had been debunked by the DOJ.
He also made what the January 6 committee described as a "thinly veiled threat" to Mr Raffensperger, who had refused the request to "find" votes.
That came on the heels of several other verbal attacks on public servants and election workers in Georgia by the fuming ousted president.
Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official, had previously called on Mr Trump to lower the temperature.
"It has to stop," he said in a public statement.
"Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed."
Mr Raffensperger later told the January 6 committee his email and mobile phone number were circulated online, which led to him receiving a torrent of abusive messages from across the country.
His wife of 40 years was also doxxed, he said. She received sexualised threats.
Mr Raffensperger told the committee he felt personally threatened by Mr Trump.
"What I knew is that we didn't have any votes to find," he said.
"We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find."
Why all eyes are on Fani Willis
The now-infamous call became the springboard for the Fulton County District Attorney's office to begin its investigation.
Fani Willis, a Democrat, is the first woman to hold the role after campaigning on a promise to restore integrity and winning the elected office.
By February 2021, she was already firing off letters to Georgia officials asking them to preserve documents pertaining to the November 2020 election.
"Our vote is as important as anyone else," Ms Willis later told CNN.
"If someone takes that away or violates it in a way that is criminal, because I sit here in this jurisdiction it's my responsibility."
Ms Willis requested a special grand jury to investigate the case, which since June 2022 has expanded well beyond Mr Trump to examine the fake electors scheme and threats to election workers.
"A special purpose grand jury is essentially an investigatory body," said Anthony Kreis, an assistant professor in law at Georgia State University.
"It's a body of everyday citizens from Fulton County who are asked to spend a considerable amount of time and focus on a particular issue that may or may not result in criminal indictments."
Whereas a prosecutor seeks indictments from a regular grand jury, a special grand jury has no indictment powers and is used to unearth evidence.
Prosecutors are among the most powerful figures in US courts, deciding whether to bring charges, which charges to bring, and whether to negotiate plea bargains.
District attorneys are the top prosecutors in their states.
Such roles have become increasingly politicised in recent years, as several so-called progressive prosecutors, who are focused on reform, have won office.
Ahead of his 2022 campaign launch, Mr Trump railed against them, labelling several high-profile investigations — including parallel criminal and civil probes into the Trump Organization in New York — a "hoax".
"These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people, they're racists and they're very sick, they're mentally sick," he said, referring to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, both of whom are black.
Mr Trump has also called other black prosecutors, including Ms Willis, "racist".
According to Mr Kreis, her decision to request a special grand jury may be in part to protect her from accusations of political bias.
"Fani Willis is a Democrat. And she's investigating Republicans," said Mr Kreis.
"And so having a kind of neutral body of everyday citizens — bus drivers and teachers and doctors and nurses and lawyers and folks from all walks of life — looking at this and making recommendations, I think, is really important.
"Because it gives her an extra layer of insulation from any allegation of being partisan-ly motivated or doing something that's less than on the up and up."
An Atlanta judge will soon decide if the special grand jury's final report should be made public, but Ms Willis has urged him to keep it secret.
"Decisions are imminent," she told Judge Robert McBurney in a recent hearing at Fulton County Superior Court.
"We want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, and we think for future defendants to be treated fairly it's not appropriate at this time to have this report released."
Mr Kreis says Ms Willis may be stalling, hoping to delay the inevitable political firestorm that could burn her chances of securing criminal indictments against Mr Trump and others.
And it looks like she's nearly ready to make her move.
The path to indictments
A coalition of US media outlets is pushing for the special grand jury's report to be released, citing the extraordinary public interest in its contents.
Alongside testimony from dozens of witnesses — including Rudy Giuliani and Brad Raffensperger — the findings of the months-long investigation could reveal if the grand jurors believe election crimes occurred.
Experts have also expressed scepticism about the legal underpinnings of Fani Willis's argument the report should remain secret.
"My best guess is that [Judge Robert McBurney] will split the baby in this case and he'll decide that the public does have an interest but great portions of the report should be redacted, or he may tie it to some sort of deadline dealing with the district attorney's decision to seek indictments or not," said Michael Moore, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Atlanta.
Mr Kreis argues the special grand jury was empanelled in the name of the people of Fulton County and paid for by taxpayers so "there's a default expectation under state and constitutional law principles, [the report] should be a public document available for the public for public consumption and review".
Both lawyers say Judge Robert McBurney has a reputation for being both thorough and expeditious — meaning, while he'll carefully weigh the pros and cons of releasing the grand juror's report, his ruling is likely to arrive swiftly.
Regardless, Ms Willis already has access to the troves of evidence and potential theory of crime contained within.
Once she lands on specific charges and defendants, she'll seek an indictment from a regular grand jury, which the district attorney's office should secure easily.
"There are often … jokes about [regular] grand juries, right, where a prosecutor can walk in and indict a ham sandwich," Mr Kreis said.
He anticipates it will likely be a matter of weeks, rather than months, until indictments are announced in Georgia.
The key question, then, is does Ms Willis have enough evidence to indict Mr Trump?
"Absolutely," said Mr Kreis.
"Law professors and lawyers will often tell you … it depends, right? That's our favourite answer. But for Donald Trump and his potential liability here, it does not depend."
Mr Kreis says it should be "patently clear" to anyone who's followed the Georgia probe that there is "considerable evidence" that could leave Mr Trump legally exposed.
"The most damning evidence is, of course, the phone call," he said.
"Because we have Donald Trump's voice on tape, where he makes an overt demand to change the tallies of an election, which is a clear violation of Georgia law, provided that he also had … the corrupt intent behind it, that he wasn't just asking for a charitable recounting of the votes."
The January 6 committee previously found that prior to calling Mr Raffensperger, Mr Trump had been told at least four times the election results were legitimate and there was no evidence of widespread election fraud in Georgia.
"We also know that his legal team knew that those allegations were false," Mr Kreis said.
What charges could Trump face in Georgia?
According to the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington DC, Mr Trump appears to be "at substantial risk of prosecution for both election and non-election crimes in violation of Georgia state law".
Those include solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties, interference with primaries and elections, and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
Brookings also suggests Mr Trump and his cohort may be criminally liable for making false statements, improperly influencing government officials, forgery in the first degree, and criminal solicitation.
The prospect of racketeering charges has also been floated.
Last year, Ms Willis brought a sweeping racketeering indictment against an Atlanta rapper Yung Thug and his Young Slime Life (YSL) syndicate that named at least 28 people.
She could, in theory, use a similar approach to indict multiple defendants for election-related crimes, including Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, and the 16 fake electors — all of whom already received target letters indicating they may face charges.
The legal distinction between conspiracy and racketeering, which is commonly associated with the mafia and criminal street gangs, is that in a conspiracy multiple parties agree in advance to engage in a criminal act.
In a racketeering scenario, the different actors may be working in tandem without knowing how they fit within a broader scheme like the "spokes of the wheel", Mr Kreis said.
The tricky task Ms Willis faces is selecting charges to hold as many parties as possible accountable under the same theory of law, according to Mr Kreis.
"And it can get very complex, it can get very politically sticky," he said.
"It's really almost an all-or-nothing proposition."
Mr Moore argues that while no political figure is above the law, an elected state prosecutor bringing a case against a sitting or former president could set a concerning precedent.
"I would rather see what I would call career prosecutors, who are typically considered to be more apolitical, in the Department of Justice look at this type of case," he said.
Mr Kreis objects to the notion a federal court should be the only place for an election-related case, given elections are primarily regulated at the state level.
"I would say if you don't want to be charged in a Fulton County, Georgia, court for violating Georgia law, don't come to Georgia and violate our laws," he said
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