Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said Tuesday that he looked into allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the 2020 election but decided against seeking charges.
The decision by Carr, a Republican and the state’s top law enforcement official, left the election interference charges against Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat who is prosecuting the case.
“We analyzed it from our perspective and chose not to go down that route,” Carr, a potential candidate for governor, said on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s “Politically Georgia” radio show. “We felt that based on the facts and the evidence, what the right thing or the wrong thing to do would be, is to not file charges in that particular situation.”
Willis told the AJC in spring 2022 that she believed she had no choice but to open a criminal investigation in early 2021 after she believed that other prosecutors, such as Carr and the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta, had conflicts because they could be potential witnesses.
Trump called Carr on Dec. 8, 2020, to “pressure him to support an election lawsuit” that was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, according to the Justice Department’s indictment against Trump. The Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which sought to throw out election results in Georgia and other states where Democrat Joe Biden won.
Former U.S. Attorney Byung “BJay” Pak told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Trump pressured him to investigate false claims of election fraud, leading to his resignation on Jan. 4, 2021.
Besides the Trump investigation, Carr said there’s still an ongoing investigation of a breach in Coffee County, where tech experts and Trump supporters copied Georgia’s election software.
The GBI completed its Coffee County investigation in August, but the attorney general’s office hasn’t pursued prosecutions. Four people involved in the Coffee County case were charged in Fulton County, and two have pleaded guilty: attorney Sidney Powell and bail bondsman Scott Hall.
“I’m not going to get into the specifics of it, but let me just say this: Anytime a prosecutor is given a case from investigators, that doesn’t necessarily mean the case is over and it doesn’t need further investigation or further analysis,” Carr said.
— AJC producer Natalie Mendenhall contributed to this article.
