ATLANTA — Georgia’s Republican Party has just started raising money for a defense fund for local Trump supporters who may be charged with trying to overturn Biden’s win in 2020.
Several Georgia supporters of former President Donald Trump face possible felony charges and years in prison if indicted and then convicted of conspiring to try to make Trump the winner of the 2020 election in Georgia, following his loss to President Joe Biden in that election.
The Georgia GOP has launched a website praising the potential Georgia defendants, calling them patriots, and asking the public for donations for a defense fund.
Former U.S. Attorney Michael Moore, who is now in private practice with Moore Hall in Atlanta and is not connected with the Fulton County case, said he’s not surprised.
“I mean, they've taken lessons from the master (Trump) at figuring out ways to monetize this to their advantage,” Moore said.
Moore pointed out that among the targets of the Grand Jury investigation in Fulton County are the 16 Georgia Republicans who met at the State Capitol on December 14, 2020, preparing to claim that they, and not Democrats, should represent Georgia in the Electoral College vote in Congress the following January 6.
Leading that meeting--David Shafer, who was then the state GOP Chair.
“If they are indicted by the Grand Jury, I think that they could be part of a larger RICO case,” Moore said, “about whether or not there was a broad effort to overthrow the election and were they part of that.... Fake electors are being prosecuted and investigated in other states. And so I think that would sort of follow suit here, and wouldn't surprise me at all.”
When Trump spoke to the Georgia GOP convention in Columbus on June 10, 2023, Shafer announced to the crowd that the state party had raised more than $65 million in the previous four years.
“And it is actually more money than has been raised in the entire history of the Georgia Republican Party,” he said.
Shafer also said that more than $1 million remained of that $65 million, after the party worked to elect Republicans across the state in the 2022 elections and fought to defeat lawsuits brought by opponents of Georgia’s new election laws that Republicans in the legislature helped write and pass.
So now the party is raising money to pay for attorneys, to represent possibly Shafer and others who may be indicted along with Trump--although court filings indicate that eight of the GA GOP’s 16 so-called alternate electors may have already accepted immunity in exchange for their testimony.
“I think there are probably a number amongst them who have seen the light,” Moore said, “and decided that rather than risk spending some time in a state hotel wearing an orange bathrobe, that they're going to, rather, cooperate and talk about what really happened that day.”
It’s not known yet which of the targets of the investigation may testify against the others, and which of them may need that defense fund that the GA GOP is trying to raise now.