The Georgia prosecutor sees the Trump case extending until 2025

Fani T. Willis, the attorney general in Atlanta who is leading an election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump and 14 of his allies, said Tuesday that a trial most likely “wouldn’t happen until the winter or early 2025.” are completed. ”

She also defended the scope of the racketeering suit she filed in August, noting that she had prosecuted much larger racketeering cases in her career. Defendants in such cases became “involved in the criminal enterprise,” she said. “They deserve to be charged. In fact, they deserved it.”

Ms. Willis’ office accused Mr. Trump and 18 other suspects of participating in a criminal enterprise aimed at changing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Four of the defendants have already reached plea deals and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

Her comments, at a women’s conference hosted by The Washington Post, came as her office sought an emergency injunction banning the release of discovery materials in the Georgia case. On Monday, videos containing private testimonies of the defendants who entered plea deals were leaked to several news outlets; Ms Willis’ office said it had not leaked the videos, which it had shared with lawyers.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee scheduled a hearing on the request for Wednesday.

In one of the videos obtained by ABC NewsJenna Ellis, a former Trump campaign lawyer who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge last month, said she was told in December 2020 by one of Mr. Trump’s longtime aides that he refused to leave the White House “under any circumstance also” despite losing the election.

In another, first reported by The PostKenneth Chesebro, another lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign, disclosed to prosecutors that he met with the president at the White House in mid-December 2020. Mr. Chesebro also discussed a memo he prepared shortly after the election, which stated that Jan. September 6, 2021 was the “real deadline for settling a state’s electoral votes.”

In the weeks after Mr. Chesebro wrote the memo, the Trump administration deployed fake electors in swing states as part of a plan to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to announce the Jan. 6 election results.

At Tuesday’s conference, Ms. Willis was asked whether it was surprising that the videos had been leaked.

“Surprising no, disappointing yes,” she said, adding that such statements – known as “proffers” – from defendants who had pleaded guilty helped prosecutors “move up the ladder” their cases against more prominent defendants.

“The Fulton County district attorney always wants to be at the top of the ladder,” she said in general terms, but also likely referring to Mr. Trump.

Steve Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead attorney in Georgia, dismissed the content of the videos on Monday, saying that “the only salient fact of this nonsensical line of inquiry is that President Trump left and returned to the White House on January 20, 2021.” to Mar-a-Lago.”

Ted Goodman, a spokesman for Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer and a defendant in the case, said Ms. Willis’s suggestion that a trial would extend into 2025 “yet shows how this whole fraudulent case is part of the Democratic Party and permanent political class’s attempt to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2024.”

Ms. Willis said in comments Tuesday that she knew when she began the investigation that she would be threatened. But she is surprised by the number of threats against her — more than 100, she said, many of them racist.

“Did I suspect that when the threats came, so many of them would be so racist in nature and that this country still had so much poison just because I was a black woman? she said. “In the last three years, I’ve been called the N-word so many times I couldn’t even think of how many times.”

“We will continue with business as usual,” she said. But she added that she now had so much security that she couldn’t easily go out with friends for a casual drink.

She declined to comment when asked whether there had been “meaningful contact” between her office and Jack Smith’s, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department who is leading two other criminal cases against Mr. Trump.

Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, insisted she was not a partisan, as Mr. Trump and some other conservatives had portrayed her. She described herself as a prosecutor.

“I am a prosecutor,” she said. “I’ll put you in prison for life and have a good night’s sleep about it.”

Christian Boone contributed reporting from Georgia.