Key witness in Georgia's Trump investigation: I'm 'emotionally torn' about the case

ATLANTA — A critical witness in a Georgia criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election said he is “emotionally torn” about the case, fearing that a potential prosecution could end up reinforcing the former president’s status as a “martyr.”

Gabriel Sterling, the chief operations officer for the Georgia secretary of state who angrily denounced Trump’s false claims of election fraud in December 2020, confirmed in an interview with Yahoo News that he met some months ago with two prosecutors and two investigators for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who grilled him about the state’s election procedures.

“They’re trying to figure out where Trump could think he has a leverage point, a point where he could manipulate the system potentially,” said Sterling.

It was the latest confirmation that Willis’s probe has been quietly active and ongoing for some time even as it is poised to soon find itself in the national spotlight. Willis has gotten approval to convene a special grand jury in May when witnesses like Sterling; his boss, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, among others, are expected to receive subpoenas to testify.

It is a probe that has taken on new significance nationally in light of the news that two top prosecutors in New York City who were working on a separate investigation into Trump’s finances have resigned, apparently after concluding that the newly elected district attorney in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, was disinclined to bring charges against the former president.

That, say multiple legal experts, leaves Willis’s probe into Trump’s effort to pressure Georgia state officials to flip the state’s electoral votes as the principal threat of criminal prosecution facing the ex-president. “It does make the Georgia case all the more important,” said Norm Eisen, a former White House lawyer under President Barack Obama who last year co-authored a report for the Brookings Institution concluding that Trump was at a “substantial risk” for multiple felony charges in Georgia, including criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and state racketeering charges.

But it is a case that is fraught with political minefields for Willis and her office — and more legal complications than have been commonly understood. “She's kind of like Wile E. Coyote picking up the dynamite stick,” said Sterling. (Separately, the committee investigating the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, argued in a Wednesday court filing seeking access to the emails of one of Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman, that the former president and his allies engaged in a “criminal conspiracy” in his efforts to overturn the election. But the committee has no authority to initiate criminal proceedings and there is still no clear indication that the Justice Department has targeted the former president.)

The Georgia investigation centers on the hourlong phone call that Trump, Meadows and three of Trump's lawyers placed to Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, in which the president repeatedly pressed the Georgia official to “find” 11,780 votes — “which is one more” than needed — to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Trump also appeared to threaten Raffensperger, telling him he was taking a “big risk” and could face criminal charges himself if he did not do what the president was demanding.

But the phone call, which was secretly taped by Raffensperger’s office and leaked to the Washington Post, has been fully public for over a year, leaving some to wonder why it has taken Willis so long to get to this point. “I know justice moves slowly sometimes, but she's been in office for 14 months,” said Raffensperger. “If it was a high priority, you know, where was she last year?”

Raffensperger remains a reluctant witness in an unenviable political vice. He is running for reelection against a Trump-backed primary opponent, Rep. Jody Hice, who has hammered him for failing to do the former president’s bidding. With the polls showing over 70 percent of GOP voters still believing in Trump’s bogus claims of election fraud, Raffensperger has tiptoed around the Willis probe. His office has turned over some 6,000 pages of internal documents relating to its handling of the 2020 election and contacts with the White House, including text messages from Meadows and multiple emails from Trump’s lawyers and political allies. (Records obtained by Yahoo News show that Willis’s office didn’t use a subpoena to get the material. Instead, on April 20, 2021, nearly 11 months ago, it filed an Open Records request for the material — something any citizen could have done — asking for all tape recordings, voicemail messages and emails to Georgia officials from Trump “and/or anyone acting on his behalf.”)

But Raffensperger himself has refused to testify without a subpoena — a key reason Willis sought the special grand jury. Once he gets one, Raffensperger, like Sterling, intends to comply. “You don't get a choice when you get a subpoena from the grand jury,” he said.

Raffensperger’s comments about the slow pace of the probe point to some of the political dilemmas Willis herself is facing as she navigates a potential prosecution of the former president. A 50-year-old graduate of Howard University and Emory Law School, Willis built up a reputation as an aggressive, hard-charging prosecutor — likened by one friend to a “tornado” in the courtroom — who, along with veteran attorney Clint Rucker, successfully tried in 2015 one of the most high-profile and controversial cases in recent Atlanta history: racketeering charges against Atlanta public school administrators and teachers for systematically changing test results of students to give them higher scores. (Thirty-four of the originally named 35 defendants were African American, making the case a touchy subject in the city’s Black community.)

But no sooner did she take office last year — after defeating her longtime boss, veteran incumbent Paul Howard — than Willis began sounding the alarm about what she described as deep-seated problems in her office. She had, she said, inherited a “mismanaged” and understaffed unit, besieged by a backlog of 12,000 unprosecuted felonies as well as surging crime rates.

“We have a public safety crisis going on,” Willis said in impassioned testimony before the Fulton County Board of Commissioners last July, pounding the table at times as she pleaded for more funding to hire prosecutors and investigators. She then proceeded to display blow-up color photographs of victims of murders, shootings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes, pointedly identifying the commissioners’ districts in which the victims resided.

“If there is anybody here confused, and thinks I’m here to talk about widgets, I’m talking about human life,” she said. “Not one of your constituents is safe.”

Willis’s powerful plea won her $5 million in new funding last September to beef up staffing in her office. But her warnings about soaring homicides and violent assaults in the county left some constituents wondering about her priorities in pursuing the Trump investigation. “We have crime issues that are unprecedented — and your focus is Trump?” said one county official who has known and worked with Willis for years.

But one Willis ally contended that a Trump prosecution would not be a distraction from other important cases. “There’s not one person in that office who’s been pulled off a murder or rape case” to investigate Trump, said Charlie Bailey, a former colleague of Willis’s in the DA’s office who is currently running for lieutenant governor of Georgia. “Fani can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Eisen, in his Brookings report, cited the Raffensperger phone call as only one piece of a wide-ranging conspiracy by Trump and his allies to improperly pressure state officials to change election results. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, appeared before a Georgia state legislative committee and made blatantly false claims about a video — calling it a “smoking gun” — that supposedly showed Fulton County election workers taking out boxes of fraudulent Biden ballots to be secretly counted on election night. (State officials found nothing improper in the handling of the ballots.) The U.S. attorney in Georgia, B.J. Pak, was effectively forced to resign — after being told Trump was planning to fire him for not endorsing the claims of election fraud. And Trump himself called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to urge him to call a “special election” to replace the certified vote count. Then he called the chief investigator in Raffensperger’s office, Frances Watson, to push her to find “dishonesty” in the vote totals.

A spokesman for Willis did not respond to requests for comment from Yahoo News on the status of the case. She has reportedly assembled a team of 10 prosecutors to conduct the investigation, including John Floyd, one of the leading authorities on the state racketeering law. She also has asked for the FBI’s help in providing security for her investigation in the face of multiple threats from Trump supporters.

Still, legal experts say, she faces substantial legal hurdles. Trump’s lawyers will almost certainly seek to move the case to federal court and attempt to have any indictment dismissed on the grounds that, since the conduct at issue took place while he was president, he is immune from prosecution. And even if those motions fail, getting a jury in Fulton County (where Trump got about a quarter of the vote in 2020 and the jury pool is 46 percent white) to unanimously conclude that he was pressuring Raffensperger to commit fraud — as opposed to urging him to find fraud that Trump genuinely believed existed — could prove challenging.

“I’m skeptical,” said Don Samuel, one of Atlanta’s most renowned defense attorneys and a self-described liberal Democrat. “It’s a little hard for me to see a jury ever convicting Trump. You’re not going to get 12 Democrats on the jury.”

Sterling is an example of the ambivalence many in Atlanta feel about the Trump probe. A loyal Republican who had long been active in state politics, Sterling burst onto the national stage after he got a disturbing phone call in the weeks after the election from a project manager for Dominion Voting Systems, the firm that had provided election machines in the state. The project manager told him about a threat on Twitter to one of her employees who had been falsely accused — by QAnon conspiracy followers — of manipulating vote totals. When he looked at the tweet, Sterling was furious.

“It said, ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’ And it had a noose kind of twisting in the sunlight,” said Sterling. “And for whatever reason, that day, that time, it hit me. I'm like ... ‘I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. I'm pissed. I've got to, we got to say something.’”

Sterling called a press conference. “I can't begin to explain the level of anger I have right now over this,” he said at the time. “Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. We're investigating. There's always a possibility, I get it, and you have the rights to go through the courts. What you don't have the ability to do — and you need to step up and say this — is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”

Sterling then raised his voice as he delivered a stark warning: “Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed.”

Those turned out to be prophetic words, coming a little more than a month before the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Today, more than a year later, Sterling suggests he still wants accountability for Trump, emphasizing at one point that “there have been no consequences for him.”

“We have laws in this country,” he said. Trump’s actions are “all the same thing to me, all the way to Jan. 6. Question, question, question. Undermine, undermine, undermine.

“And he made a game out of it, almost. Because the more he was persecuted — I'm putting big air quotes up there — the more he was able to give himself a freer rein to do whatever he felt like.”

And yet, when it comes to Willis’s probe, Sterling worries that a criminal prosecution will only make Trump even more of a “martyr” to his supporters, “which means he can raise even more money.”

“I don't know what the right path is on this thing,” he said.