Why Georgia's prosecution of Trump is different from his other indictments

Donald Trump was hit with his fourth indictment since March on Monday, but in many ways the Georgia investigation surrounding allegations of 2020 election interference has been the most exhaustive.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opened the probe in February 2021, a few weeks after the infamous phone call in which Trump pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" him the number of votes needed to overcome Joe Biden's advantage in the state. Most of 2022 was consumed with a fact-finding grand jury, before this year's grand jury with the power to indict heard the outline of the prosecution's case.

How long has the Georgia investigation been going on? One of the witnesses who appeared before the fact-finding grand jury — former state House speaker David Ralston — died from an illness 10 months ago.

While confusion or possibly fatigue over Trump's widening legal exposure may be setting in, there are several reasons why this particular indictment is important as he seeks to become president again in the 2024 election.

In the federal cases Trump faces involving the 2020 election and the unlawful retention of government documents, a Republican winner of the 2024 presidential election could move to pardon Trump, though they would have to assess the potential backlash and political cost of doing so in their calculus. The issue of a self-pardon, were Trump to win the 2024 election, has never been tested and could land in the Supreme Court.

But federal pardons cannot be applied to state charges faced in Georgia, nor in the New York case scheduled for trial involving allegations of falsified business records after the disbursement of hush money payments.

Georgia, unlike New York, is also among the few states in which the governor does not have unilateral pardon power. Instead, state laws lay out a highly prescribed process in which an applicant must wait five years after serving their sentence, while having "lived a law-abiding life" in the interim.

"The state charges in Georgia could be very serious and could mean real prison for him, in a way that he could not stop in any way, even after becoming president," Duke University professor Mac McCorkle told CBC's The National.

One wild card: the Republican-led state legislature passed a bill in May that makes it easier to remove locally elected prosecutors for perceived soft-on-violent crime records. Democrats in Georgia have expressed concern it could be utilized as a pretext to prevent Willis from completing her work in this case.

In the special counsel prosecution concerning the 2020 election, there are six unnamed co-conspirators who could conceivably be charged themselves, but haven't yet. The documents case, also being overseen by the special counsel under the aegis of the Justice Department, has seen two little-known Trump employees indicted.

The Fulton County indictment is in the first in which several notable names and/or elected officials face legal accountability related to the last presidential election. (In Michigan earlier this month, a 2022 Republican state attorney general candidate was indicted for allegedly gaining access to voting machines).

That's because the efforts to prevent a Biden win in Georgia were multifaceted, according to the indictment — not just the infamous Trump phone call to Raffensperger, but allegations of harassing a state election worker, attempting to persuade state legislators to appoint entirely new electors favourable to Trump, and tampering with voting machines in a rural Georgia county.

Eighteen others face charges. In addition to a raft of Georgia state and local politicians, the list includes a number of lawyers either working on the Trump campaign or at the White House and Justice Department, including Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell.

Mark Meadows could be the first White House chief of staff to serve prison time since H.R. Haldeman for his role in the Watergate scandal nearly 50 years ago. As well, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was indicted Monday, another hit to a reputation that was once sterling when he helped lead New York City as mayor in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.