Georgia has laws against making false statements in official settings. Those who testified falsely before the legislature “may also face liability under Georgia’s conspiracy to commit election fraud statute,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, and who co-wrote a report by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization in Washington, examining the Georgia case.
Conspiracy charges could be considered for Trump allies who spoke at hearings and other official events, “to the extent their statements and other conduct were part of the larger Trump-led scheme to interfere in the election in the state,” Mr. Eisen said. Ms. Willis has also, according to interviews and court records, weighed the possibility of bringing racketeering charges, which could be broadly applied.
After hearing from a number of nonpartisan elections experts, as well as witnesses like Mr. Cheeley who believe the election was stolen, the grand jurors unanimously found that there was no evidence of significant vote fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election, according to a portion of their final report that was publicly released.
Surveillance footage from State Farm Arena after the 2020 contest shows some election workers running ballots through scanners more than once, leading Mr. Cheeley to claim at the December 2020 hearing that the workers were double- and triple-counting votes from Atlanta, a Democratic stronghold. “One man, one vote, just went out the window at the State Farm Arena,” he told the lawmakers, while talking over video clips.
But Georgia’s Republican leaders, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have repeatedly said that there was no conspiracy to steal the election.
“The standard operating procedure on a high-capacity scanner is that if there is a misread, you take that batch, press a button, delete that batch, and take that batch and put it back in again,” said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, in an interview. “We also know, if there had been multiple scans, there would have been a lot more votes than there were ballots.”
