Elie Honig Pans ‘Slow’ Pace of Georgia Investigation Into Trump and Concludes, ‘The D.A. Does Not Have the Evidence’
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said he doesn’t believe the Fulton County district attorney has sufficient evidence to indict Donald Trump over a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state last year.
Fani Willis has been investigating Trump’s actions during a phone call he had with Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021. In that call, Trump infamously pressured the top elections official in Georgia, which he lost weeks prior in the presidential election, to fabricate enough votes to put him over the top.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger. (Joe Biden had won the state by 11,779 votes.)
Willis told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday that the probe into the call is entering a new phase.
“We realize that we’re coming to a place that there are enough people that will require a subpoena for us to speak to or for us to be able to get information,” she said.
Willis added that she expects the grand jury in the case will be busy over the summer.
AJC reporter Tamar Hallerman explained to Erin Burnett on Friday that Willis “really has hit a wall” and is running out of people who are willing to speak with her office without being subpoenaed.
Burnett turned to Honig, a former federal prosecutor, and asked, “What does the timeline suggest to you?”
Here was his response:
I know firsthand that criminal investigations take time, but not this much. It is impossible for me to reconcile the galactically slow pace of this investigation with the seriousness of the potential crimes. I’ve seen prosecutors have to deal with very high stakes potential charges in cases as complex or maybe more complex than this get it done in weeks, maybe months. But here we are, we’re already more than a year out and just now the D.A. is getting to the ramp up phase? Just now we’re gonna get a grand jury seated three more months from now in May? I mean, you need a grand jury from day one in a case like this.
So ultimately, I don’t know what conclusions to draw other than these: one, the D.A. does not have the evidence that she needs right now to indict; and two, they’re not bringing the urgency to this case that it requires.
Watch above via CNN.
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