Georgia GOP’s legal bills for 'alternate' Trump electors top $500K: report

The Georgia Republican Party spent more than $500,000 in the first half of this year representing “alternate” electors under investigation by local authorities in connection with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The party has spent more than $520,000 in legal fees in the first six months of this year, which is around 75 percent more than it spent all of 2022 and a five-fold increase over the previous year, according to the report, which cites newly filed campaign disclosures.

The AJC reports that more than $340,000 was spent representing fake electors who may be targets of the Fulton County probe led by District Attorney Fani Willis.

The extent the Georgia GOP’s involvement in defending the fake electors became apparent earlier this year when former party Chair David Shafer, who was among the 16 fake electors, announced he wasn’t seeking an additional term and thanked the party for covering his legal expenses during his farewell speech, the report said.

“I have raised the money to honor that commitment,” he wrote in a note to activists, “so that none of them have had to pay a penny out of pocket.”

James Salzer writes for the AJC that: “The false slate of electors became a major point of interest to a Fulton County special grand jury, as some legal experts say those GOP electors may have violated election fraud and forgery statutes, among other crimes.”

“The fake electors, who met the same day in December 2020 that the state’s electors cast Georgia’s votes in the Electoral College for Joe Biden, submitted to state and federal authorities documents that claimed they were the ‘duly elected’ electors from the state, which they said Trump won.”

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