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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. 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      Giuliani Is a Target in Georgia’s Trump Election Inquiry, Lawyer Says

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      Rudolph W. Giuliani, as former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.ATLANTA — The legal pressures on Donald J. Trump and his closest allies intensified further on Monday, as prosecutors informed his former personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Mr. Giuliani was a target in a wide-ranging criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia.The notification came on the same day that a federal judge rejected efforts by another key Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, to avoid giving testimony before the special grand jury hearing evidence in the case in Atlanta.One of Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert Costello, said in an interview that he was notified on Monday that his client was a target. Being so identified does not guarantee that a person will be indicted; rather, it usually means that prosecutors believe an indictment is possible, based on evidence they have seen up to that point.Mr. Giuliani, who as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer spearheaded efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, emerged in recent weeks as a central figure in the inquiry being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta.Earlier this summer, prosecutors questioned witnesses before the special grand jury about Mr. Giuliani’s appearances before state legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.For Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, the developments are the latest in a widening swath of trouble, though he got some good news recently when it emerged that he was unlikely to face charges in a federal criminal inquiry into his ties to Ukraine during the 2020 presidential campaign.Mr. Giuliani is scheduled to appear before the special grand jury on Wednesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse. His lawyer, Mr. Costello, said in the interview that Mr. Giuliani would probably invoke attorney-client privilege if asked questions about his dealings with Mr. Trump. “If these people think he’s going to talk about conversations between him and President Trump, they’re delusional,” Mr. Costello said.The rejection of Senator Graham’s effort to avoid testifying came in a written order from a Federal District Court judge in Atlanta, Leigh Martin May. Mr. Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, is now set to testify on Aug. 23.The judge found that prosecutors had shown that there is “a special need for Mr. Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections.”Lawyers for Mr. Graham have said that he was informed by prosecutors that he was a witness, not a target.Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Trump Hires #BillionDollarLawyer

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      As top allies of Donald J. Trump are called to testify in Atlanta, he has hired a high-profile local attorney best known for representing rappers.ATLANTA — Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a prominent Atlanta lawyer to represent him in a criminal inquiry into election interference in Georgia.The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer. But he is also well regarded for a range of criminal defense work that he has done in Georgia, and his hiring underscores the seriousness of the investigation — as well as the potential legal jeopardy for Mr. Trump.The investigation is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta. At least 17 people have been designated as targets who could face criminal charges. Mr. Trump is not among them, but a special grand jury is continuing to consider evidence and testimony, with several top Trump advisers still to appear. Ms. Willis has said that she is weighing a number of potential criminal charges, including racketeering and conspiracy.In a hearing on Tuesday, a state judge told lawyers for Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that their client needed to travel to Atlanta to testify next week. On Wednesday, lawyers for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina faced a skeptical reception from a federal judge to their efforts to quash a subpoena from Ms. Willis’s office seeking the senator’s testimony. The lawyers for Mr. Graham who appeared in court included Donald McGahn, former White House counsel for Mr. Trump.Mr. Findling brings decades of trial experience ranging from high-profile murder cases to local political corruption scandals. But in the past, he has been openly — indeed, scathingly — critical of the former president.Understand Georgia’s Trump InvestigationCard 1 of 5Understand Georgia’s Trump InvestigationAn immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Trump Hires ‘Billion Dollar Lawyer’

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      As top allies of Donald J. Trump are called to testify in Atlanta, he hires a high-profile local attorney best known for representing rappers.ATLANTA — Amid a deepening swirl of federal and state investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has hired a high-powered Atlanta lawyer to represent him in an inquiry into election interference in Georgia.The lawyer, Drew Findling, has represented an array of rap stars including Cardi B, Gucci Mane and Migos, and is known by the hashtag #BillionDollarLawyer.But he has not been a fan of Mr. Trump; in one 2018 post on Twitter, after Mr. Trump criticized LeBron James, Mr. Findling referred to Mr. Trump as “the racist architect of fraudulent Trump University.” In 2017, after Mr. Trump fired the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, Mr. Findling said on Twitter that it was “a sign of FEAR that he would aggressively investigate the stench hovering over this POTUS.”He has also called Mr. Trump’s history of harsh comments about the five Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongly convicted of the brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park “racist, cruel, sick, unforgivable, and un-American!”Mr. Findling, who has been an advocate of criminal justice reform and a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In addition to becoming a sort of celebrity among celebrities for his vigorous defense of famous hip-hop artists — with multiple appearances in Instagram photos alongside A-list rappers, often sporting dark sunglasses — Mr. Findling has done criminal defense work for a number of high-profile political clients in the Atlanta area.Among them was Mitzi Bickers, who once worked in the administration of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and who was convicted in March on nine federal corruption counts as part of a multimillion-dollar contracting and kickback scandal.Another client, Victor Hill, is the sheriff of Clayton County, a suburban area south of Atlanta. Mr. Hill, an African American with a tough-on-crime reputation, has been indicted on numerous federal civil rights charges for the alleged mistreatment of detainees at the local jail, and has been suspended from his position pending trial.The investigation into postelection meddling is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta. To date, at least 17 people have been designated as targets who could face criminal charges. Mr. Trump is not among them, but evidence and testimony are still being taken in by a special grand jury, and Ms. Willis has said she is weighing a number of potential criminal charges, including racketeering and conspiracy.In a hearing on Tuesday, a state judge told lawyers for Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that their client needed to travel to Atlanta to testify next week. And in a hearing in federal court here Wednesday, lawyers for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina faced a skeptical reception from a judge on their efforts to quash a subpoena from Ms. Willis’s office seeking the senator’s testimony. More

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      The Fake Electors Scheme, Explained

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      The plan to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election by creating slates of electors pledged to Donald Trump in states he had lost was expansive, long-running and often confusing.The brazen plan to create false slates of electors pledged to former President Donald J. Trump in seven swing states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. was arguably the longest-running and most expansive of the multiple efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.It was also one of the most confusing, involving a sprawling cast of pro-Trump lawyers, state Republican officials and White House aides in an effort that began before some states had even finished counting their ballots. It culminated in the campaign to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the false slates to subvert congressional certification of the outcome on Jan. 6, 2021 — and in the violent attack on the Capitol that unfolded as he refused to do so.The scheme had a vague historical precedent and was rooted, at least in theory, in a post-Reconstruction Era law designed to address how to handle disputed elections. But it was deemed illegal by Mr. Trump’s own White House Counsel’s Office. Even some of the lawyers who helped come up with the idea referred to it as fake and acknowledged that it was of dubious legality, according to a cache of email messages brought to light by The New York Times.The fake electors tactic caught the attention of state law enforcement officials around the beginning of this year, and soon became a focus of the inquiry being conducted by the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6.The plan has also figured prominently in an investigation that an Atlanta-area prosecutor is conducting into Mr. Trump’s alleged election meddling. And it is at the heart of the Justice Department’s own wide-ranging Jan. 6 inquiry.Here is a look at the plan: where it came from; how it was meant to work; the various inquiries it has now become a part of; and the ways in which it could serve to implicate Mr. Trump in criminal activity.Vice President Richard M. Nixon campaigned in Hilo, Hawaii, during the presidential race of 1960. A dispute over the outcome there was cited by Trump allies in developing slates of so-called alternate electors after the 2020 race.Associated PressHawaii, 1960, Provided the Template In one of the first legal memos laying out the details of the fake elector scheme, a pro-Trump lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro justified the plan by pointing to an odd episode in American history: a quarrel that took place in Hawaii during the 1960 presidential race between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard M. Nixon.The results of the vote count in Hawaii remained in dispute — by about 100 ballots — even as a crucial deadline for the Electoral College to meet and cast its votes drew near. A recount was underway but it did not appear as though it would be completed by the time the Electoral College was expected to convene, on Dec. 19, 1960.(The winner of the popular vote in nearly all of the states is allocated all of that state’s electors, which are apportioned based on population. Maine and Nebraska are the exceptions; they allocate their electors based on the winners in congressional districts. To win the presidency, a candidate has to win a majority of the 538 total electoral votes.)Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      Sharp Contrasts With Other Jan. 6 Inquiries Increase Pressure on Garland

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      The continued revelations from the House select committee and the rapid pace of the Georgia investigation have left the Justice Department on the defensive.In the last week, local prosecutors in Atlanta barreled ahead with their criminal investigation into the effort by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, targeting fake electors, issuing a subpoena to a member of Congress and winning a court battle forcing Rudolph W. Giuliani to testify to a grand jury.In Washington, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack unfurled its latest batch of damning disclosures about Mr. Trump at a prime-time hearing, and directly suggested that Mr. Trump needs to be prosecuted before he destroys the country’s democracy.But at the Justice Department, where the gears of justice always seem to move the slowest, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland was forced to rely on generalities about the American legal system, saying “no person is above the law in this country” as he fended off increasing questions about why there has been so little public action to hold Mr. Trump and his allies accountable.“There is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what’s it not doing, what our theories are and what our theories aren’t, and there will continue to be that speculation,” Mr. Garland said at a briefing with reporters on Wednesday as he appeared to grow slightly irritated. “That’s because a central tenet of the way in which the Justice Department investigates and a central tenet of the rule of law is that we do not do our investigations in public.”The contrast between the public urgency and aggressiveness of the investigations being carried out by the Georgia prosecutors and the congressional committee on the one hand and the quiet, and apparently plodding and methodical approach being taken by the Justice Department on the other is so striking that it has become an issue for Mr. Garland — and is only growing more pronounced by the week.The House committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, with more still coming in, and has selectively picked evidence from what it has learned to set out a seamless narrative implicating Mr. Trump. The Georgia prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, appears to be assembling a wide-ranging case that some experts say could lead to conspiracy or racketeering charges.Exactly what is going on inside the Justice Department remains largely obscured, beyond what it prioritized in the months after the attack: its prosecution of hundreds of the rioters who stormed the Capitol and its sedition cases against the extremist groups who were present.But through subpoenas and search warrants, the department has made clear that it is pursuing at least two related lines of inquiry that could lead to Mr. Trump.One centers on the so-called fake electors. In that line of inquiry, prosecutors have issued subpoenas to some people who had signed up to be on the list of those purporting to be electors that pro-Trump forces wanted to use to help block certification of the Electoral College results by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.Investigation of the fake electors scheme has fallen under Thomas Windom, a prosecutor brought in by the Justice Department last year to help bolster its efforts. Mr. Windom’s team has also issued subpoenas to a wide range of characters connected to the Jan. 6 attacks, seeking information about lawyers who worked closely with Mr. Trump, including Mr. Giuliani and John Eastman, the little-known conservative lawyer who tried to help Mr. Trump find a way to block congressional certification of the election results.Thomas Windom is a prosecutor brought in by the Justice Department last year to investigate the so-called fake electors scheme.Julio Cortez/Associated PressEarlier rounds of subpoenas from Mr. Windom sought information about members of the executive and legislative branches who had been involved in the “planning or execution of any rally or any attempt to obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the 2020 election.The other line of Justice Department inquiry centers on the effort by a Trump-era Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, to pressure Georgia officials not to certify the state’s election results by sending a letter falsely suggesting that the department had found evidence of election fraud there.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 9Making a case against Trump. More

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      On the Docket: Atlanta v. Trumpworld

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      ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding assemblage of characters:A United States senator. A congressman. A local Cadillac dealer. A high school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers aiding Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor. The former president himself. And a woman who has identified herself as a publicist for the rapper Kanye West.Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been leading the investigation since early last year. But it is only this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and target letters, as well as court documents that illuminate some of the closed proceedings of a special grand jury, that the inquiry’s sprawling contours have emerged.For legal experts, that sprawl is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what she has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud, or racketeering-related charges for engaging in a coordinated scheme to undermine the election.“All of these people are from very disparate places in life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said of the known witnesses and targets. “The fact that they’re all being brought together really suggests she’s building this broader case for conspiracy.”What happened in Georgia was not altogether singular. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has put on display how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results in several crucial states, including by creating slates of fake pro-Trump electors. Yet even as many Democrats lament that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its inquiry, the local Georgia prosecutor has been pursuing a quickening case that could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.Whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be targeted for indictment remains unclear. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less encumbered than that of federal officials in Washington by the vast political and societal weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a bitterly fissured country.But some key differences in Georgia law may also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal courts. And there was the signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s conduct in Georgia: his call to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whose office, in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County, recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to reverse his defeat.A House hearing this past week discussed a phone call in which President Donald J. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” an additional 11,780 votes.Shawn Thew/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump’s staff did not comment, nor did his local counsel. When Ms. Willis opened the inquiry in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.” Lawyers for 11 of the 16 Trump electors, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pierson, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate the nominee electors, not to investigate their conduct.”Last year, Ms. Willis told The New York Times that racketeering charges could be in play. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” she said, before explaining that charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act could apply in any number of realms where corrupt enterprises are operating. “If you have various overt acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can — you may — get there,” she said.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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      Judge Criticizes Georgia Prosecutor for Aiding the Political Rival of a Trump Ally

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      Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Atlanta, is leading an investigation into election interference by Donald J. Trump. A Republican targeted by her inquiry wants her disqualified.ATLANTA — A Georgia judge on Thursday criticized the Atlanta prosecutor leading an investigation into election interference by Donald J. Trump and his allies, calling her decision to host a fund-raiser for a political rival of one of the targets of her inquiry a “what-are-you-thinking moment.”But the judge, Robert C. I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, did not rule on a motion to disqualify the prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, and he also denied a motion to quash subpoenas sent to 11 bogus electors who filed paperwork falsely claiming that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election.A lawyer for one Trump elector, State Senator Burt Jones, argued that Ms. Willis should be disqualified from the case, or at least from his part of the case, because she hosted a fund-raiser for Charlie Bailey, a Democrat running against Mr. Jones to be Georgia’s next lieutenant governor.“Find somebody who doesn’t have a dog in the hunt,” the lawyer, William D. Dillon, said during the court proceedings. “Fani Willis has a dog in the hunt.”A lawyer representing Ms. Willis’s office, Anna Green Cross, pointed out that the fund-raiser was “very clearly identified” in a flier as pertaining to a runoff election in the Democratic primary, not the general election matchup against Mr. Jones.But the judge was clearly troubled by it. “The optics are horrific,” he said, adding that it created at least an appearance problem. “If we are at a cocktail party and people are asking, ‘Do you think that this is a fair and balanced approach to things?’” he said, and continued, “Well, how do you explain this?” He also expressed concern that the district attorney, as “the legal adviser to the grand jury,” was “on national media almost nightly talking about this investigation.”Criticism aside, efforts to remove prosecutors have been tried, unsuccessfully, in other Trump-related cases. Late last year, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt an inquiry by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, arguing that her public criticism of Mr. Trump had violated several of his constitutional rights, including those to free speech and due process. That suit was dismissed in May. Judge McBurney told a lawyer for several of the pro-Trump electors, Holly Pierson, “you’re not asking, I hope, that we have to have a Republican district attorney investigate this, because that’s the only way it will be fair?”Ms. Pierson said she was not.The legal maneuvers come as Ms. Willis’s investigation has been intensifying and has emerged as the inquiry that puts Mr. Trump and some of his allies in perhaps the most immediate criminal jeopardy.In recent weeks, Ms. Willis has sought to compel testimony from a number of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator Lindsey Graham and John Eastman. She has also informed at least 17 people connected to the case that they are targets who may be charged. Her office has said that it is weighing a range of charges, including conspiracy and racketeering, and that a special grand jury has been meeting for weeks in Atlanta to hear testimony and review documents and videos that may shed light on the multipronged effort to put Georgia in Mr. Trump’s win column.Judge McBurney also said on Thursday that if the grand jury’s report was ready near the November election, he would keep it sealed until afterward.Richard Fausset contributed reporting from Atlanta. More