Special Grand Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Concludes Its Investigation

ATLANTA — Eight weeks into Donald J. Trump’s latest run for president, a special grand jury investigating Mr. Trump and his allies for possible election interference in 2020 concluded its work on Monday. But the panel’s findings remain private for now, including whether it recommended criminal charges against the former president.

The special grand jury was dissolved days after producing a report that was reviewed by the 20 judges on the Superior Court of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta. Its members were sworn in last May.

“The court thanks the grand jurors for their dedication, professionalism and significant commitment of time and attention to this important matter,” Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the panel, wrote in an order dissolving it.

A hearing will be held on Jan. 24 to determine whether the report will be made public, as the special grand jury is recommending, according to the judge’s order. Special grand juries cannot issue indictments, so any criminal charges would have to be sought from one of the regular grand juries that consider criminal matters in the county.

Regular grand jury terms last two months. Defendants who are indicted can request speedy trials that begin by the close of the term that follows the two-month period in which they are indicted. Because of those protocols, most charges would most likely be brought at the beginning of the next grand jury term in early March, or further down the road.

The office of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, has spent two years investigating whether Mr. Trump and his allies violated any Georgia laws as they tried to overturn President Biden’s victory there in 2020. Prosecutors are known to have informed nearly 20 people that they may face criminal charges as a result of the investigation. Their targets include Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, and David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

It is not yet clear if Mr. Trump himself is at risk of facing charges in the investigation.

In court papers, Ms. Willis’s office has said that it is investigating “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Her team has weighed possible conspiracy and racketeering charges, among others. Among the evidence she has examined is the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, imploring him to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse the outcome of the presidential election in the state. At the time, Mr. Trump had not yet conceded to Mr. Biden.

The creation of an alternate slate of bogus Georgia presidential electors after the 2020 election has also been a subject of intense scrutiny, and some legal analysts have said that scheme in particular could lead to charges under the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. Each of the Trump electors has been told they are a target who could face charges, according to their lawyers or related court filings.

“When we see what a large group of people was working together on the Georgia fake elector scheme — from the former president, his chief of staff, his personal attorneys down to local campaign officials and lawyers in Georgia — the district attorney’s possible interest in bringing RICO charges makes more and more sense,” said Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, in an email.

Like the federal law upon which it is based, the Georgia RICO statute makes it a crime for people to participate in an “enterprise” that is engaged in a pattern of criminal activity. The Georgia statute is broader than the federal statute, and also makes it a crime to conspire to commit racketeering.

The Georgia investigation has the potential to be a particularly perilous one for Mr. Trump. An analysis by a group of legal experts, released by the Brookings Institution in 2021, lays out a number of Georgia state laws that Mr. Trump may have violated in the weeks after the 2020 election, including solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.

Ms. Willis has shown time and again that she is partial to deploying racketeering charges against various groups that she believes have engaged in wrongdoing. She did so in 2014, as an assistant district attorney, when she helped lead a high-profile criminal trial against a group of educators in the Atlanta public school system that had been involved in a widespread cheating scandal. More recently, she has used the state’s RICO statute to go after alleged criminal street gangs, including YSL, the group co-founded by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, better known as Young Thug. Jury selection is currently underway in a Fulton County trial for Mr. Williams and a number of other accused YSL members.

“I’m a fan of RICO, I’ve told people that,” Ms. Willis said during a news conference last year to announce gang-related indictments. “RICO is a tool that allows a prosecutor’s office, and law enforcement, to tell the whole story.” She added that she used such charges to help ensure that jurors “can have all the information they need to make a wise decision.”

Mr. Trump has derided the Georgia investigation as a “witch hunt.” Last January, at an event in Conroe, Texas, he lashed out at Ms. Willis and other prosecutors conducting investigations of him, calling them “vicious” and “racist” (Ms. Willis, a Democrat, is Black).

Other episodes that have been scrutinized during the investigation include attempts by Trump allies to pressure a local elections worker, Ruby Freeman, and an effort by Trump supporters to access and copy sensitive election software in rural Coffee County, Ga. Mr. Giuliani also made numerous false claims about election fraud in Georgia state legislative hearings, which have been another subject of the inquiry.