State's 'badly inadequate effort' to probe voting machine breach hurts Fani Willis: expert

Georgia Prosecutor Fani Willis charged people allegedly involved in the plot to breach and disseminate voting machine information in Coffee County as part of her sprawling election racketeering case — with key associates of former President Donald Trump like attorney Sidney Powell caught up in it. But she was not the only one investigating that breach; the statewide Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) was running a parallel investigation as well.

At least, partially. Writing for Lawfare on Tuesday, legal journalist Anna Bower revealed that the state's investigation into the Coffee County breach was sorely lacking.

The GBI "recently completed its 13-month investigation, culminating in a 392-page investigative report, which is now in the hands of Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr. He will decide whether to pursue charges based on its findings. Earlier this month, Lawfare obtained a copy of the document and published it," wrote Bower. What the document shows is that "the GBI did not investigate the Coffee County affair fully at all. The agency relied almost entirely on the previous work of civil litigants and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. It failed to seek interviews with key witnesses, and it omitted relevant evidence that is readily available in public documents." Moreover, "the GBI’s strategy or organizational priorities as they relate to the Coffee County investigation are also not public."

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All told, she wrote, the GBI's investigation was a "barely adequate effort" and the lack of primary investigation was "sufficiently baffling as to warrant serious scrutiny."

This matters, Bower continued, because although Willis has laid out a huge legal case against Trump and his associates, she does not have adequate powers to investigate this affair entirely on her own — as evidenced by the fact there is a federal criminal case overlapping with the Georgia one, although the Coffee County breach has not landed in that probe's sights.

"In addition to her jurisdictional limitations, Willis has relatively limited resources compared to that of statewide or nationwide law enforcement agencies," Bower wrote Tuesday. "For this reason — compounded by the apparent lack of interest of the Department of Justice and the special counsel’s office — it necessarily fell to the GBI to thoroughly and completely investigate the alleged crimes in Coffee County. The agency’s investigative report suggests that it has not done that. Memo to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr: You have been ill served by your investigative department. There’s still a lot of work to do."