The Fulton County district attorney expressed concern about the former president’s comments at a rally in Texas.
ATLANTA — The district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is conducting a criminal investigation of former President Donald J. Trump has asked for an F.B.I. risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta, citing “alarming” rhetoric used by Mr. Trump at a rally in Texas over the weekend.
The Fulton County prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, is planning to impanel a special grand jury in May to look into accusations that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to improperly influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Among other things, the investigation is looking into a call that Mr. Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.
Ms. Willis, a Democrat, made her request for a security assessment in a letter on Sunday to J.C. Hacker, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Atlanta field office. Ms. Willis said that she and her staff had “already made adjustments to accommodate security concerns during the course of the investigation, considering the communications we have received from persons unhappy with our commitment to fulfill our duties.”
But she also noted that Mr. Trump, at his rally in Conroe, Texas, on Saturday, made “multiple references to investigations that are known to concern his activities.” Ms. Willis’s request to the F.B.I. was reported earlier by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
At the rally, Mr. Trump said he would consider, if re-elected in 2024, pardoning people prosecuted for the attack on the National Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and told supporters to start protests in Atlanta and New York — where he is also facing civil and criminal investigations of his business — if prosecutors “do anything wrong.”
Ms. Willis noted that Mr. Trump told the crowd, “If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”
She also noted that Mr. Trump said the investigations involved “prosecutorial misconduct,” and said the prosecutors were “vicious horrible people.” “They’re racist and they’re very sick,” he continued. “They’re mentally sick.”
Ms. Willis is African American, as are Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is conducting a civil investigation of Mr. Trump, and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who inherited the criminal inquiry in New York from his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who is white.
Ms. Willis said the rhetoric was “more alarming” in light of Mr. Trump raising the possibility of pardoning the Jan. 6 protesters.
“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Willis wrote.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
