The fake GOP electors in Georgia that former President Donald Trump recruited as part of his failed attempt to stay in power are starting to point fingers at each other, court documents revealed on Tuesday.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the Atlanta-area prosecutor who’s investigating Trump’s effort to upend American democracy there, laid out the details in a legal memo to a state judge—one that hints at criminal indictments to come.
According to the memo, prosecutors in July last year dangled immunity deals for “alternate electors” who were willing to cooperate with the investigation—but their defense lawyer is now accused of never telling them about the potential deal.
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Following a special purpose grand jury recommendation in December that the DA seek indictments against some people involved in the fraudulent scheme, investigators have turned up the pressure.
It turns out, these Republican officials and political operatives are now starting to squirm, identifying illegal behavior by their colleagues while trying to save their own skin—a sudden pivot that came when Willis’ investigators met with these fake electors last week.
Wednesday and Friday, “some of the electors stated that another elector… committed acts that are violations of Georgia law and that they were not party to these additional acts,” Willis explained in her court filing.
That description means that certain Republicans are now identifying crimes committed by a colleague while distancing themselves from that criminal behavior.
But that situation has created what Willis calls “an impracticable and ethical mess,” because 10 of these fake electors are being represented by a single Atlanta defense lawyer—who can’t possibly advocate for clients who are simultaneously ratting each other out. The DA’s office is using those details to make the case that the judge should intervene and disqualify that defense lawyer, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow, citing a conflict of interest.
The DA also accused Debrow of highly unethical behavior, noting how several fake electors interviewed last week revealed that they’d never been told about the potential immunity deals—because Debrow never conveyed the message. The DA said that failure “is in direct conflict” with what Debrow’s fellow defense lawyer, Holly A. Pierson, told the judge in August last year.
Debrow, a former local prosecutor in a neighboring county, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Pierson, a former federal prosecutor, called the allegations “entirely false” and said the court has documents that undermine the DA’s previous attempts to disqualify the defense lawyers.
“Sadly, the DA's office continues to seem more interested in media attention, trampling on the constitutional rights of presumptively innocent citizens, and recklessly defaming its perceived opponents than in the facts, the law, or the truth,” Pierson said in a statement.
The DA’s filing on Tuesday is the first indication of who exactly will get hit with criminal charges when Willis seeks an indictment through an Atlanta grand jury—which is expected in the coming weeks.
Debrow represents 10 of the 11 fake electors in question. That list includes Mark Amick, Joseph Brannan, Brad Carver, Vikki Consiglio, John Downey, Carolyn Fish, Kay Godwin, Cathy Latham, Shawn Still and Chandra “C.B.” Yadav.
The list is a “who’s who” of Georgia politics. Amick, Consiglio, and Still have been members of the Georgia Republican Foundation, a fundraising group that attends VIP dinners and touts connections to Trump and his associates. Carver is a lobbyist who serves as the GOP’s chairman in Georgia's 11th congressional district. Brannan is the state’s GOP treasurer. Fisher is the state GOP’s first vice chairwoman. Godwin is an activist who founded Georgia Conservatives in Action. Yadav worked on Kelly Loeffler’s failed Senate bid.
Meanwhile, Latham was previously the top GOP official in a rural Georgia County who coordinated a secret operation to have conspiracy theorists examine local election system computers in early 2021—one that was exposed by The Daily Beast and is now under investigation.
During an hour-long interview last year, she lied repeatedly about her role in putting together the covert mission, which involved having computer forensics experts charter a private plane to the small town and enter a county building to tap into government servers. But text messages and public records revealed she was central to orchestrating the plan.
Now that some of these Republicans seem willing to expose their colleagues’ roles in the fake elector scheme, Debrow’s connections to them “poses a serious risk to the fundamental principle of confidentiality of information,” the DA argued. Willis asked Judge Robert C.I. McBurney to block Debrow “from any further participation” in the case, given that she knows too much already about what others have done.
Willis is leading what is widely considered the most clear-cut criminal investigation of Trump’s Big Lie in 2020, when he used his presidential campaign and lawyers to conduct an all-out assault on the nation’s elections system. Her investigation initially focused on Trump’s menacing Jan. 2, 2021 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where he pressured the elections official to “find 11,780 votes.” That investigation has since expanded to review the actions across the state to undermine the 2020 elections there.
