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      For Trump’s Lawyers, Legal Exposure Comes With the Job

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      The many lawyers who have helped the former president avoid removal from office and indictment have drawn legal problems of their own.A dark joke has begun circulating among lawyers following the many legal travails of former President Donald J. Trump: MAGA actually stands for “making attorneys get attorneys.”Over six years and nine major investigations by Congress, the Justice Department and local prosecutors, as Mr. Trump has managed to avoid removal from the presidency and indictment, it has become clear that serving as one of his lawyers is a remarkably risky job — and one that can involve considerable legal exposure. Time after time, his attorneys have been asked to testify as witnesses to potential crimes — or come under scrutiny as possible criminal conspirators themselves.While the consequences his lawyers faced were extraordinary when Mr. Trump was in the White House, the dangers have only intensified since he left office and have become increasingly acute in recent weeks, as the former president has come under scrutiny in two different Justice Department investigations and has been forced yet again to find lawyers willing to represent him.Last week, a Justice Department filing revealed that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had misled federal investigators about whether he had handed over to the Justice Department all the classified documents he took from the White House when he left office. That raised questions about whether the lawyers, M. Evan Corcoran and Christina Bobb, could be prosecuted themselves and might ultimately be forced to become witnesses against their client. (Ms. Bobb recently retained a lawyer, according to a person familiar with the situation.)The revelation capped a summer in which a team of lawyers that had been advising Mr. Trump as he tried to overturn the 2020 election faced a range of repercussions across the country from federal investigators, local prosecutors, state bar associations and government accountability groups.One of Mr. Trump’s highest-profile lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was named as a target in a state criminal investigation in Georgia. The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who came up with what he conceded privately was an unlawful strategy to help Mr. Trump overturn the election, said he believed he was a target in that same investigation and declined to answer questions while being deposed before a grand jury. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman have also been named as subjects of interest in a flurry of federal grand jury subpoenas seeking evidence about attempts by Mr. Trump’s allies to create fake slates of electors to help keep him in office.Two others who worked for Mr. Trump in the White House — the White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone and his deputy Patrick F. Philbin — were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington investigating the efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the roles that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman had played in helping Mr. Trump.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Philbin and at least nine other lawyers who worked for Mr. Trump have testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Earlier this year, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin also were interviewed by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation into the classified documents investigation.A video clip of John Eastman, left, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for the House Jan. 6 committee was shown in a hearing this summer.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd 17 mostly lesser-known lawyers who represented Mr. Trump in battleground states as he tried to overturn the election are facing ethics complaints, putting them at risk of being disciplined or disbarred by bar associations or the courts.Vigorously defending the client — even one known for unscrupulous behavior or accused of an egregious crime — is part of a lawyer’s basic job description. But attorneys are bound by a code of professional conduct that forbids them from crossing certain lines, including knowingly making false claims, filing frivolous lawsuits or motions, and doing anything to further a crime.The adage for lawyers representing clients accused of criminality, said Fritz Scheller, a longtime Florida defense lawyer, is that at the end of the day, no matter how bad it may have been for the client, the lawyer still gets to walk out the front door of the courthouse without any personal legal issues.“That bad day for the criminal defense attorney becomes his worst day when he leaves through the courthouse door used for defendants on their way to jail,” Mr. Scheller said.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Election Data Breach Attracts Georgia Investigators

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      The district attorney in Atlanta is seeking to build a broad conspiracy case that encompasses multifaceted efforts by Trump allies to disrupt and overturn the 2020 election.The day after Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, a small group working on his behalf traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta.One member of the group was Paul Maggio, an executive at a firm based in Atlanta called SullivanStrickler, which helps organizations analyze and manage their data. His company had been hired by Sidney Powell, a conspiracy theorist and lawyer advising Mr. Trump, who was tasked with scouring voting systems in Georgia and other states. It was part of an effort by Trump allies in a number of swing states to access and copy sensitive election software, with the help of friendly election administrators.“We are on our way to Coffee County, Georgia, to collect what we can from the election/voting machines and systems,” Mr. Maggio wrote to Ms. Powell on the morning of Jan. 7, 2021, according to an email exchange that recently emerged in civil litigation. Weeks later, Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who traveled to Coffee County on a chartered plane, described what he and the group did there.“We scanned every freaking ballot,” he said in a recorded phone conversation in March 2021. Mr. Hall said that the team had the blessing of the local elections board and “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.”This week, court filings revealed that the Coffee County data breach is now part of the sprawling investigation into election interference being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta.Though Coffee County is well outside of her jurisdiction, Ms. Willis is seeking to build a broad conspiracy and racketeering case that encompasses multifaceted efforts by Trump allies to disrupt and overturn the lawful election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. On Aug. 16, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation also confirmed that it was working with the Georgia secretary of state’s office on an investigation into the Coffee County data breach, court records show. Many of the details of the Coffee County visit were included in emails and texts that surfaced in civil litigation brought by voting rights activists against Georgia’s secretary of state; news of the breach was reported earlier by The Washington Post.A Trump supporter protested election results at the Georgia State Capitol in 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesSimilar breaches coordinated by Trump allies played out in several swing states. This month, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, sought the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate data breaches there. She is seeking to remove herself from the case because one of the people potentially implicated in the scheme is her likely Republican election opponent, Matthew DePerno. Ms. Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.SullivanStrickler, in a statement released by a law firm representing the company, said it “has never been part of a ‘pro-Trump team’ or any ‘team’ whose goal is to undermine our democracy,” adding that it was a “politically agnostic” firm that was hired to “preserve and forensically copy the Dominion voting machines used in the 2020 election.” The statement said it was “categorically false” that SullivanStrickler was part of an effort that “illegally ‘breached’ servers” or other voting equipment, adding that it was retained and directed by “licensed, practicing attorneys.”“The firm elected to cease any further new work on this matter after the Jan. 7 time period,” the statement said. “With the benefit of hindsight, and knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.”Legal experts say the Fulton County investigation could be particularly perilous for Mr. Trump’s allies, and perhaps for Mr. Trump himself, given the phone call that Mr. Trump made as president to Georgia’s secretary of state on Jan. 2, 2021, asking him to “find” enough votes to help him overturn his election loss in the state.A special grand jury has been impaneled with the sole purpose of investigating election meddling in the state and has already heard testimony from more than 30 witnesses, including Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani is one of at least 18 people who have been notified by prosecutors that they could face indictment in the case.This week, prosecutors filed court documents indicating that they were seeking testimony from a number of other Trump allies, including Ms. Powell and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff. The petition seeking to compel Ms. Powell’s testimony notes that Ms. Powell coordinated with SullivanStrickler “to obtain elections data” from Coffee County, adding: “There is further evidence in the public record that indicates that the witness was involved in similar efforts in Michigan and Nevada during the same time period.”As a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after the election, Ms. Powell made a number of specious claims about election fraud, including an assertion that Democrats had “developed a computer system to alter votes electronically.” Ms. Powell is among those who have been sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems, the company that provides the voting machines for Coffee County and the rest of Georgia. As part of that suit, lawyers for Ms. Powell have argued that “no reasonable person would conclude” that some of her wilder statements “were truly statements of fact.”Fulton County prosecutors are seeking to have Ms. Powell testify before the special grand jury next month. In their court filing this week, they said that she possessed “unique knowledge” about postelection meetings held at the South Carolina plantation of L. Lin Wood, a pro-Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist. Mr. Wood, prosecutors wrote, stated that he and a group of other Trump supporters, including Ms. Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, met at the plantation to explore “options to influence the results” of the 2020 election “in Georgia and elsewhere.”President Donald J. Trump departed a campaign rally in support of Georgia’s Republican senators in 2020.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMs. Willis’s office cited the Coffee County data breach in its filing on Thursday seeking Ms. Powell’s testimony, which was the first time the matter had surfaced in connection with her investigation. It remains unclear to what extent Ms. Willis’s office will focus on the Coffee County matter in her inquiry, or what, if any, charges could flow from it.“There are a variety of avenues the state has to bring criminal charges,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit brought by civic groups against the Georgia secretary of state’s office over election security. “There are specific laws in Georgia that prevent access to voting equipment in particular,” he said, as well as “general laws about accessing computer equipment that doesn’t belong to you.”Mr. Trump won nearly 70 percent of Coffee County, which is home to just 43,000 people. Trump officials most likely targeted the county’s voting system because the county was run by friendly officials who were eager to cooperate. Cathy Latham, who was chair of the local Republican Party at the time, was also one of 16 pro-Trump fake electors who convened in the Georgia State Capitol on Dec. 14, 2020, despite Mr. Trump’s loss in the state. All of them, including Ms. Latham, have been identified as targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation.The costs of election security breaches have been onerous. In Antrim County, Mich., which was at the forefront of efforts to overturn the election, Sheryl Guy, the clerk, said on Thursday that officials had to rent voting equipment to replace equipment that is being held as evidence in civil litigation.In Colorado, the secretary of state’s office estimated that taxpayers incurred a bill of at least $1 million to replace voting equipment in Mesa County after a pro-Trump election supervisor was indicted on charges that she tampered with the equipment after the 2020 election. Election experts noted that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, recommended that the safest course of action was to decommission voting equipment that has been compromised.“We’re getting to the point where this is happening at an alarming rate,” Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, said in an interview on Thursday. “When election officials permit or facilitate untrustworthy actors in gaining access to the system without any oversight, that is in and of itself going to leave the public questioning whether they trust these systems.”Nick Corasaniti More

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      Georgia Governor Seeks to Keep Distance From Trump Inquiry

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      ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp was one of the Georgia Republican officials who declined to help Donald J. Trump overturn his 2020 election loss in the state — a decision that had him hailed as a hero in some quarters.And yet, on Thursday, Mr. Kemp’s lawyers showed up in an Atlanta courtroom to argue that the governor should not have to help with the ongoing criminal investigation into election meddling by testifying before a special grand jury. Mr. Kemp’s legal team has accused Fani T. Willis, a Democrat and the local prosecutor leading the inquiry, of politicizing the investigation, and wants any testimony to take place after the polls close on his re-election bid in November.In a sign of how widely her case is expanding, Ms. Willis also moved on Thursday to compel testimony from a number of additional Trump advisers, including Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff in the White House, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who advanced the most aggressive conspiracy theories falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen. And Ms. Willis indicated in court filings that her investigation now encompasses “an alleged breach of elections data” in rural Coffee County, Ga., which was part of a larger effort by Trump allies to infiltrate elections systems in swing states.In court, the lawyers for Mr. Kemp made a number of arguments as to why he should not have to comply with the subpoena at all, but they were received skeptically by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who did not immediately make a ruling.“The governor doesn’t think he’s beyond any reach of law, but he’s just beyond the reach of this particular subpoena,” said S. Derek Bauer, one of Mr. Kemp’s lawyers.Mr. Kemp, who is locked in a tight race for re-election with Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, has tried to maintain a difficult balancing act since falling out of Mr. Trump’s good graces. The former president soured on Mr. Kemp in 2020 after the governor declined Mr. Trump’s request to call a special session of the Georgia Legislature so that a group of pro-Trump electors could be named in place of the legitimate ones earned by Joseph R. Biden Jr., who defeated Mr. Trump by just under 12,000 votes in the state.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, was scheduled to testify before the grand jury in Atlanta on Thursday.Tom Williams/Getty ImagesAt one point, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp “the worst ‘election integrity’ governor in the country.”Since then, even as his name elicited torrents of boos from the Trump faithful at rallies and Republican events, Mr. Kemp has found a way to stay alive politically. In May, he crushed Mr. Trump’s handpicked Republican primary candidate, David Perdue, the former U.S. senator, by focusing on his record of conservative policy accomplishments and economic success, and largely avoiding the topic of Mr. Trump.But the general election fight presents its own complex series of calculations. Though polling in recent months has shown Mr. Kemp leading Ms. Abrams, she is a formidable fund-raiser hoping to ride a wave of changing demographics and fresh concerns about Republican overreach on issues like abortion.Charles S. Bullock III, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, said Mr. Kemp might be wary of turning off some centrist voters, but the deeper risk could be turning off Mr. Trump’s considerable base in Georgia.Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Lindsey Graham Resists Testifying in Trump Investigation in Georgia

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      ATLANTA — Six days after major news organizations declared Donald J. Trump the loser of the 2020 presidential election, his allies were applying a desperate full-court press in an effort to turn his defeat around, particularly in Georgia.The pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell went on television claiming that there was abundant evidence of foreign election meddling that never ultimately materialized. Another lawyer, L. Lin Wood, filed a lawsuit seeking to block the certification of Georgia’s election results.That same day, Nov. 13, 2020, Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters, made a phone call that left Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, immediately alarmed. Mr. Graham, he said, had asked if there was a legal way, using the state courts, to toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures.The call would eventually trigger an ethics complaint, demands from the left for Mr. Graham’s resignation and a legal drama that is culminating only now, nearly two years later, as the veteran lawmaker fights to avoid testifying before an Atlanta special grand jury that is investigating election interference by Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Graham has put together a high-powered legal team, which includes Don F. McGahn II, a White House counsel under Mr. Trump. While Mr. Graham’s lawyers say that they have been told that he is only a witness — not a target of the investigation — that could change as new evidence arises in the case, which is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga. Her efforts to compel Mr. Graham to testify have been aided by legal filings from a number of high-profile, outside attorneys, including William F. Weld, a Trump critic and former Republican governor of Massachusetts.Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, center, during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesUnderscoring the risks for Mr. Graham, lawyers for 11 people who have been designated as targets who could face charges in the case have said that they were previously told that their clients were only “witnesses, not subjects or targets,” according to court filings.On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit temporarily blocked Mr. Graham from testifying and directed a lower court to determine whether he was entitled to a modification of the subpoena based on constitutional protections afforded to members of Congress. After that, the appeals court said, it will take up the issue “for further consideration.” The matter is now back before Leigh Martin May, a Federal District Court judge who already rejected Mr. Graham’s attempt to entirely avoid testifying; she asked the sides to wrap up their latest round of legal filings by next Wednesday. It seems increasingly likely that Mr. Graham will testify next month.Ms. Willis has said that she is weighing a broad array of criminal charges in her investigation, including racketeering and conspiracy. She has already informed at least 18 people that they are targets, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. Mr. Giuliani fought to avoid testifying in person but was forced to appear before the grand jury last week.Regarding Mr. Graham, Ms. Willis’s office is seeking to learn more about his role in Mr. Trump’s post-election strategy, and who he spoke to on the Trump campaign team before or after he called Mr. Raffensperger. While Mr. Trump assailed Mr. Raffensperger on Twitter as a “so-called Republican” on the same day as that call, Mr. Graham told CNN that the former president did not encourage him to place the call.Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Giuliani Associate Sought Pardon for Him After Jan. 6, Book Says

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      The letter, which also requested that Rudolph W. Giuliani be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was intercepted before reaching President Donald J. Trump.An associate of Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, tried to pass a message to Mr. Trump asking him to grant Mr. Giuliani a “general pardon” and the Presidential Medal of Freedom just after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to a new book.The associate, Maria Ryan, also pleaded for Mr. Giuliani to be paid for his services and sent a different note seeking tens of thousands of dollars for herself, according to the book, “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor,” by Andrew Kirtzman, who had covered Mr. Giuliani as a journalist. The New York Times obtained an advance copy of the book, which is set to be released next month.Bernard B. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani’s close adviser and the New York City police commissioner for part of his time as mayor, stopped the letter from getting to Mr. Trump. And it is unclear if Mr. Giuliani, who helped lead the efforts to overturn the 2020 election but has repeatedly insisted he did not seek a pardon shielding him from potential charges, was involved in the request.But the letter adds another layer to the complex picture now swirling around Mr. Giuliani as he faces legal fallout from his efforts to try to help Mr. Trump cling to power, including being notified that he is a target in at least one investigation.“Dear Mr. President,” Ms. Ryan wrote in the letter, dated Jan. 10, 2021, according to the book, “I tried to call you yesterday to talk about business. The honorable Rudy Giuliani has worked 24/7 on the voter fraud issues. He has led a team of lawyers, data analysts and investigators.”Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsMaking a case against Trump. More

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      Graham Ordered to Appear Before Atlanta Grand Jury Investigating Trump

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      A federal judge declined to stay her order that Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina appear on Tuesday before a special grand jury in Atlanta.ATLANTA — A federal judge on Friday turned down a request by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to avoid testifying next week before a special grand jury investigating attempts by former President Trump and his allies to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia.The order, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May, means that Mr. Graham, a South Carolina Republican and staunch Trump ally, is on track to appear in a closed-door session of the special grand jury on Tuesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse. However, Mr. Graham already has taken his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which has the ability to step in to postpone his appearance.Judge May had earlier issued an order forcing the senator to give testimony, but Mr. Graham asked the judge to stay the order while he pursued his appeal in the case. On Friday, the judge wrote that “the public interest would not be served” by granting a stay and delaying Mr. Graham’s testimony.“In this context, the public interest is well-served when a lawful investigation aimed at uncovering the facts and circumstances of alleged attempts to disrupt or influence Georgia’s elections is allowed to proceed without unnecessary encumbrances,” Judge May, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote.Mr. Graham is one of a number of Republican witnesses who have fought subpoenas to appear in person before the grand jury. So far, most have lost.Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, spent hours before the same special grand jury earlier this week, after initially saying that health conditions prevented him from flying to Atlanta from New York. Two other Trump team lawyers who unsuccessfully fought their subpoenas, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, are scheduled to appear before the grand jury before the end of the month.And a hearing in Fulton County Superior Court has been scheduled for Thursday to consider Gov. Brian Kemp’s efforts to quash a subpoena compelling his testimony. In a motion this week, the Georgia Republican argued that he had been mistreated by the office of Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, and claimed that she had subpoenaed him “for improper political purposes.”Lawyers for Mr. Graham have said that he was informed by Fulton County prosecutors that he was a witness, not a target, in the case.Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, spent hours before the special grand jury in Atlanta this week.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesEven so, prosecutors want Mr. Graham’s testimony for a number of reasons. Among them are two phone calls that he placed just after the 2020 election to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Graham inquired about ways to help Mr. Trump by invalidating certain mail-in votes.They also want to ask him other questions about what they have called “the multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Prosecutors have said in court documents that they expect Mr. Graham’s testimony “to reveal additional sources of information” related to their investigation.Mr. Graham’s lawyers have argued, among other things, that he should be shielded from testimony under the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which bars questioning of members of Congress about their legitimate legislative activities. They argue that he made the phone calls to Mr. Raffensperger as part of his work as a senator and a former chair of the Judiciary Committee.But they were unable to persuade the judge that they had enough of a case to earn a stay. She noted that there were “multiple areas of proper inquiry” in the case that were not related to Mr. Graham’s work as a senator.And the judge agreed with Ms. Willis’s office that waiting for his appeal to be resolved could cause serious delays and potentially have a negative effect on the special grand jury’s work — particularly when it came to revealing “new categories of information and witnesses, thereby compounding the total delay and hampering the grand jury as it attempts to carry out its investigation expeditiously.” More

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      Rudy Giuliani to Face Atlanta Grand Jury Investigating Trump Today

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      The former New York mayor has been told that he is a target in the investigation concerning whether Donald J. Trump and his associates tried to illegally influence the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.ATLANTA — When Rudolph W. Giuliani traveled to Georgia’s capital city in December 2020 to make fanciful public accusations of election fraud on behalf of President Donald J. Trump, he was greeted in a manner befitting the emissary of the most powerful man on earth, and posed for photos with admirers and sympathetic state politicians.On Wednesday morning, Mr. Giuliani was back in Atlanta, this time under very different circumstances.The former New York City mayor, who was serving as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer after the November 2020 election, showed up shortly before 8:30 a.m. to appear before a Fulton County special grand jury conducting a criminal investigation into postelection meddling by Mr. Trump and his associates. Local prosecutors informed Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers this week that he was a “target” in that investigation, meaning that his indictment was possible.Instead of visiting the elegant gold-domed State Capitol — where he and a pro-Trump group made a number of false claims about election fraud, raising concerns about untrustworthy voting machines and suitcases of illegal ballots — Mr. Giuliani appeared a few blocks away at the Fulton County court complex, where Atlantans go to resolve real estate disputes, file for divorce or be arraigned for armed robberies.Mr. Giuliani arrived in a black Yukon Denali with his lawyer, Robert Costello, and Vernon Jones, a prominent Trump supporter in Georgia and a vociferous promoter of the unfounded idea that Mr. Trump won the state in 2020.Asked what he expected to talk about, Mr. Giuliani told a large crush of reporters outside the courthouse, “They’ll ask the questions, and we’ll see.”Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has asked the F.B.I. to provide stepped-up security at the downtown courthouse, after Mr. Trump called prosecutors like her “vicious, horrible people.”Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers fought to keep him from having to travel to Atlanta. Instead, they offered to have him appear via videoconference, and argued that he was too feeble to travel by air after having a pair of cardiac stents inserted in early July. But Judge Robert C.I. McBurney ruled last week that Mr. Giuliani could always travel “on a train, on a bus or Uber.” On Monday, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani declined to say how his client planned to get to Atlanta from New York.Mr. Giuliani is not the only high-profile member of Mr. Trump’s team who is less than thrilled about having to show up in Georgia to be asked about what prosecutors call “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to appear before the special grand jury.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSenator Lindsey Graham was ordered by a federal judge on Monday to appear before the special grand jury, after Mr. Graham tried to find a way out of it. Mr. Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said he would take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, arguing that under the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution, his status as a senator shielded him from having to testify.“This weaponization of the law needs to stop,” Mr. Graham said in a statement. “So I will use the courts. We will go as far as we need to go, and do whatever needs to be done, to make sure that people like me can do their jobs without fear of some county prosecutor coming after you.”Two other lawyers on the Trump team, Jenna Ellis of Colorado and John Eastman of New Mexico, were scheduled to have hearings in their home states after Ms. Willis’s office filed “petitions for certification of need for testimony” concerning them. Such petitions are typically filed only when a potential witness refuses to testify or cannot be reached by prosecutors.In Ms. Ellis’s hearing on Tuesday, a court in Colorado ordered her to appear and testify before the special grand jury in Atlanta on Aug. 25. Mr. Eastman is expected to appear at a court hearing in Santa Fe on Aug. 26.It seems unlikely that Mr. Giuliani, 78, will say much to the grand jury when he is called to testify behind closed doors. “I just can’t imagine, at this point, him cooperating,” said Michael J. Moore, an Atlanta lawyer who served as a U.S. attorney in Georgia. “He’s got several avenues that he can take. One is to claim that he can’t answer questions because of attorney-client privilege. Another is because he’s been identified as a target, and he’s going to invoke the Fifth Amendment.”Still, the visit may be of use to the prosecutors leading the Georgia investigation, which Ms. Willis has said may result in racketeering or conspiracy charges against several defendants.Though it is not clear what charges Mr. Giuliani might face, witnesses who have already gone before the grand jury have said that the jurors were particularly interested in two appearances by Mr. Giuliani in December 2020 before state legislative panels, where he made a number of false assertions about election fraud.Unlike a trial jury, which would be instructed not to make any inferences about a criminal defendant’s silence, a grand jury is allowed to draw its own conclusions when witnesses or targets invoke their Fifth Amendment rights in declining to answer questions. (The special grand jury in Georgia cannot indict anyone; its job is to write a report saying whether the jurors believe crimes occurred. A regular grand jury could then issue indictments based on the special jury’s report.)Page Pate, a veteran Atlanta trial lawyer, said that prosecutors may also try to argue to a judge that attorney-client privilege does not apply to some questions asked of Mr. Giuliani, because of the “crime fraud exception” to the privilege, which essentially states that lawyers cannot be shielded from testifying if they helped their clients commit a crime.Even if Mr. Giuliani is successful in dodging questions much of the time, Mr. Pate said, important information about the scope of the scheme to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss might still be divulged in the course of questioning.“Why not just grill him and see what happens?” Mr. Pate said.Outside the grand jury room, Mr. Giuliani has been talkative. In an interview on Monday with Newsmax, a far-right news channel, he said the Fulton County inquiry amounted to a “desecration of the Sixth Amendment,” which guarantees the right to a public trial and a lawyer, among other things.“I was his lawyer of record in that case,” Mr. Giuliani said, referring to Mr. Trump and his concerns about the election results. “The statements that I made are either attorney-client privileged, because they were between me and him, or they were being made on his behalf in order to defend him.”In total, 18 people are known to have been identified as targets of the investigation, including 16 pro-Trump “alternate electors” in Georgia who were sworn in on the same day as the state’s legitimate presidential electors. On Tuesday afternoon, 11 of the alternate electors began an effort to potentially disqualify Ms. Willis and her office from handling the case — an attempt connected to Ms. Willis’s previous disqualification from one portion of the investigation.In July, Judge McBurney prohibited Ms. Willis and her office from developing a criminal case against Georgia State Senator Burt Jones, a Trump ally and alternate elector, citing a conflict of interest — namely, that Ms. Willis, a Democrat, had headlined a fund-raiser for a fellow Democrat running against Mr. Jones in the race for lieutenant governor.Judge McBurney ruled that the decision to bring charges against Mr. Jones must be left to a different prosecutor’s office.On Tuesday, a lawyer for 11 of the alternate electors asked the court to disqualify Ms. Willis and her office from the entire proceeding, or at least to let the 11 electors be part of the “carve out” affecting Mr. Jones, on the grounds that all of the electors “have significant roles” in the state Republican Party, and that most of them had supported Mr. Jones’s campaign for lieutenant governor. More