While the 34-count indictment handed down by a grand jury in Manhattan is currently making the headlines, failed one-term, twice-impeached former president Donald Trump faces much greater legal peril — including decades behind bars — in the state of Georgia.
Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis certainly understands that her investigation is serious business and is taking every precaution, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
Willis travels with a security detail and has equipped some members of her team with bulletproof vests and keychains with panic buttons. Early last year, she urged the FBI to conduct a risk assessment of the Fulton courthouse and government center after Trump called for similar large-scale protests against “prosecutorial misconduct” during a political rally. A few months later, the Fulton Sheriff’s office blocked off vehicle traffic on the streets surrounding the courthouse the day members of a special grand jury were selected and deployed a SWAT team to protect jurors as they returned to their cars hours later. It also assigned heavily armed officers to guard the courthouse steps and a bomb-sniffing dog the day a key witness, Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, arrived to testify.
Charles Pierce of Esquire notes that even if Trump does manage to slither out of being convicted in New York, the stakes in the Peach State are significantly higher.
And, even if the former president* were to win in New York, so what? Willis’ charges are far more serious than Bragg’s are. In Atlanta, the former president* may be indicted for crimes against the republic, for offenses against the idea of popular democracy. That is also Jack Smith’s brief for the DOJ, an investigation that looms like a giant Dust Bowl cloud behind these state prosecutions. Time has come today, in the immortal words of the Chambers Brothers. There are things to…realize.
