Potential Georgia indictment could be the most consequential for Trump: columnist

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to announce a decision over whether to indict Donald Trump in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election sometime in the next few weeks.

Should the Georgia prosecutor elect to indict the former president, it may be the most consequential of the cases the former president would be facing, UCLA Professor of Law and Political Science Richard L. Hasen writes in a column for The Los Angeles Times.

Hasen notes that the Georgia case is especially important because should Trump win the 2024 election, he wouldn’t be able to shut down the case as he would Jack Smith’s cases, which are being tried in federal courts, and that he couldn’t fire Willis.

Hasen writes that the Georgia case would also help facilitate the prosecution of others, noting that other than Trump, no charges have been filed in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Hasen also notes that “the state prosecutions remind us that American elections are decentralized and that the safeguarding of our democracy cannot just be the responsibility of the federal government.”

Hasen argues that the decentralization of elections is a key element of American democracy that the Georgia case would help preserve.

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“Those who attempted to steal the 2020 election from Biden sought to leverage this intense decentralization by finding willing participants at every level of government who would claim fraud, illegality, voting machine malfunctions or something else as a predicate to undoing a result that proved — in recounts, court cases and investigations — to be fair and accurate,” Hasen writes.

“The state prosecutions should help to show just how vulnerable to manipulation our voting systems are. Is there an ‘insider threat’ from those working for state or local election officials with access to voting machinery and voter data? Does the state have an adequate set of rules to ensure that the correct electoral college votes will be transmitted to Congress? Is there adequate opportunity to observe ballot tallying? Are electoral procedures transparent and checkable?”

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