Columbus Republican is a target in Fulton County Trump probe, court documents show
A Columbus man who served as a fake presidential elector for Donald Trump could face criminal charges as part of a grand jury investigation into the former president’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
Georgia GOP treasurer Joseph Brannan, along with 15 other Republicans including party chairman David Shafer, are now targets in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ probe, according to court documents.
In a court filing Tuesday, attorneys representing Brannan and 10 of the other electors said they were served subpoenas on June 1 and later informed they were targets of the investigation on June 28. The electors said the Fulton County DA’s office treated them as witnesses rather than subjects of the investigation from April until late June.
The 11 electors had previously agreed to voluntary interviews. However, special prosecutors cited “new evidence” that made the electors targets of the investigation, according to a motion filed by the electors’ attorneys, Holly Pierson and Kimberly Debrow.
Pierson and Debrow filed a motion seeking to block the electors’ scheduled appearances as “unreasonable and oppressive.” Their filing also supports a motion from GOP Lt. Gov. candidate Burt Jones, who seeks to get Willis disqualified from the case and have any grand jury reports sealed until after the November elections. Jones was also part of the fake elector group.
The 11 electors have invoked their 5th Amendment rights and will not provide “substantive testimony” to the grand jury after being named as targets, according to the court document.
The filing states the electors acted lawfully and at the direction of legal counsel as Trump’s election challenges in Georgia were unsettled. The electors also said they acted transparently and could not have anticipated any attempt to misuse their “contingent” electoral votes.
“The abrupt, unsupportable, and public elevation of all eleven nominee electors’ status wrongfully converted them from witnesses who were cooperating voluntarily and prepared to testify in the Grand Jury to persecuted targets of it,” the motion reads. “The unavoidable conclusion is that the nominee electors’ change of status was not precipitated by new evidence or an honestly-held belief that they have criminal exposure but instead an improper desire to force them to publicly invoke their rights as, at best, a publicity stunt.”
Brannan has not returned text messages and calls from Ledger-Enquirer reporters for the past several weeks.
In a January interview, Brannan told the L-E that his intention was not to subvert democracy but to protect Trump’s legal rights after the former president and Shafer filed a lawsuit alleging the election was in doubt.
“There was enough to meet the initial standard to show there were (enough) ballots in dispute,” Brannan said. “This was being asked by the (Trump) campaign. So if it preserved his legal rights, that made sense to me… If Biden had a lawsuit pending and the Democratic electors filed paperwork to preserve his legal challenge, I would have had no issue.”
Brannan, who has served as the state party treasurer since May 2019, was selected as one of the GOP presidential electors by the state executive committee in March 2020.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 5:01 PM.