The office of Georgia's secretary of state has launched the first known investigation of former President Donald Trump for potentially committing a state election crime.
The announcement revives the question of whether Trump broke the law when he telephoned Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" enough votes to reverse his loss of the state.
That incident dominated the nation's attention for only a few days — until the mob invasion of the Capitol, which has led to the Senate impeachment trial that opened Tuesday afternoon, on the even more astonishing charge that a sitting president had incited an insurrection.
A spokesman for Raffensperger, Walter Jones, said Monday that the office was acting as required in response to a formal complaint. "The investigations are fact-finding and administrative in nature. Any further legal efforts will be left to the attorney general," he said.
The usual intermediate step in Georgia is for the secretary of state to refer any findings to the Republican-controlled State Election Board, which may dismiss cases, levy fines or refer cases to the attorney general's office for potential prosecution. There is no deadline, and there's no chance the board will take action when it meets Wednesday.
Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney of Fulton County (which covers much of Atlanta), has signaled she is weighing whether to begin a separate criminal inquiry.
The Jan. 2 call was one of several attempts by Trump to persuade top Republican officials to locate sufficient instances or even allegations of voting fraud to reverse or at least cast doubt on his 12,000-vote defeat in Georgia. That margin was certified after three different statewide tallies, and both Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp said they were confident the results were clean.
On the call, Raffensperger told Trump the "data you have is wrong" as he rebutted the president's false claims that he had won Georgia's 16 electoral votes and kept alive a winning streak for the GOP nominee begun in 1996.
The complaint that prompted the preliminary criminal inquiry was filed by George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf III.
Trump's vigorous effort to reverse the outcome in Georgia — which he did not match anywhere else, and which even if successful would still have put him well short of a second term — may have violated at least three of the state's statutes. Criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and conspiracy to commit an election crime can both be prosecuted as felonies, while it is a misdemeanor to commit "intentional interference" with another's "performance of election duties."
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.