UPDATE (May 5, 2023; 10:35 p.m. ET): NBC News on Friday confirmed at least eight so-called fake electors have accepted immunity deals in the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s 2020 election interference probe.
It was the year after the 2020 presidential election when we first learned about the fake electors. As regular readers no doubt recall, Republicans in several states created forged election materials after Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat, pretending to be “duly elected and qualified electors.” The partisan then sent the documents to, among others, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. archivist, as if the fake materials were legitimate. They were not.
As scrutiny of the controversy intensified, we also learned that members of the former president’s team were involved in trying to execute this scheme.
It’s against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported this afternoon:
At least eight of the 16 Georgia Republicans who convened in December 2020 to declare Donald Trump the winner of the presidential contest despite his loss in the state have accepted immunity deals from Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating alleged election interference, according to a lawyer for the electors. Prosecutors with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) told the eight that they will not be charged with crimes if they testify truthfully in her sprawling investigation into efforts by Trump, his campaign and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, according to a brief filed Friday in Fulton County Superior Court by defense attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow.
In recent months, as part of his pushback against the investigation in Georgia, the former president has repeatedly tried to argue — in increasingly strange ways — that his provocative and dubious post-election lobbying of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was legal and “perfect.”
But while those communications remain highly relevant, and may yet point to Trump’s potentially criminal liabilities, today’s brief serves as a reminder that the Raffensperger pressure isn’t the full extent of the broader controversy.
The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added:
The news that some — but likely not all — of the electors will not be charged raises new questions about the scope of Willis’s examination of the meeting of electors, all of whom she had previously identified as criminal targets in her investigation. The electors who accepted immunity did so without any promise that they would offer incriminating evidence in return, and they all have stated that they remain unified in their innocence and are not aware of any criminal activity among any of the electors, Debrow said.
It was just last week when the Fulton County district attorney indicated that she would announce over the summer whether Trump and/or his allies would be charged with crimes related to alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.
It was a month earlier when the former president’s attorneys tried to quash the report of a special grand jury that investigated into whether there were any “coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections” in Georgia by him and his allies.
One of the members of that special grand jury told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in March, “A lot’s gonna come out sooner or later. And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”
We’ll have more on this story on “Alex Wagner Tonight” at 9 p.m. ET.
