Donald Trump appears destined to face yet another set of indictments as a  Georgia prosecutor prepares a grand jury to probe the ex-president’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Two witnesses who previously received subpoenas confirmed on Saturday that they have been told to appear before a grand jury in Atlanta on Tuesday, the clearest indication yet that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will lay out her case to the jury after more than two years of investigating.

Geoff Duncan, the state’s former lieutenant governor, told CNN that he had been asked to testify on Tuesday.

“I’ll certainly answer whatever questions are put in front of me,” said Duncan, a Republican who has criticised Trump’s false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

An independent journalist, George Chidi, said in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that he had also been instructed to appear on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Willis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

She has already indicated she would seek charges by the end of next week, and security measures have visibly increased around the county courthouse in recent weeks.

If Trump is charged in Georgia, it would mark his fourth indictment in less than five months, and the second to arise from his efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

He was charged earlier this month in Washington federal court with orchestrating a multistate conspiracy to reverse the election results.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the Washington case, has also charged Trump separately in Florida with illegally retaining classified documents after leaving office and with obstruction of justice.

Manhattan prosecutors, meanwhile, indicted Trump this spring for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump years ago.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, despite his legal woes. He has portrayed all the investigations as part of a coordinated effort by Democrats to undermine his candidacy.

In a post on his Truth Social site on Saturday, Trump again called the Georgia investigation a “witch hunt.”

Willis is expected to charge multiple people, possibly by using the state’s broad racketeering statute.

Her investigation began soon after Trump made a phone call to the state’s top election official, Republican Brad Raffensperger, and urged him to “find” enough votes to alter the outcome.

In addition to efforts to pressure Georgia officials, Willis has examined a breach of election machines in a rural county and a plot to use fake electors in a bid to capture the state’s electoral votes for Trump rather than Biden.

Chidi, the journalist, has written about happening upon a secret meeting of those electors at the state capitol in December 2020.

Duncan, the former head of the state Senate, publicly criticised Republican lawmakers and Trump associates who pushed the false narrative that the election was tainted by fraud.

Trump swoops into Iowa, scrambling rival’s campaign

Republican presidential rivals Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are holding competing events in the early nominating state of Iowa at a time when the former president overwhelmingly dominates opinion polls and the Florida governor scrambles to reset his troubled campaign.

DeSantis, who has had two staff shake-ups in the past three weeks and is sinking in the polls, had long planned to attend the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, a political must for aspiring presidential candidates in the state that kicks off the Republican nominating contest in January.

Trump’s late announcement on Tuesday that he was also going to attend the event on the same day as DeSantis amounted to a political gate-crashing of DeSantis’ appearance, one the Florida governor hopes will kick-start his stalled campaign.

DeSantis is making a high-risk bet that he can halt Trump’s march to the Republican presidential nomination by winning Iowa.

Iowa holds the first of the state-by-state Republican nominating contests on January 15.

DeSantis hopes a win in the Midwestern state will give him valuable momentum against Trump before primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Trump’s appearance at the Iowa State Fair just hours after DeSantis’ could steal the limelight from the governor and dominate the headlines.

The fair is held in the state capital Des Moines and runs from Thursday to August 20.

Last year, it attracted more than a million visitors.

Trump’s appearance will also complicate efforts for the rest of the Republican field.

Apart from Trump and DeSantis, nine other candidates will be attending the fair between Friday and August 18, but all are languishing in single digits, more than 40 points behind Trump, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll of likely Republican voters.

According to that August 3 poll, Trump also leads DeSantis by 34 points, 47 per cent to 13 per cent.

Most of Trump’s rivals, including DeSantis, have agreed to be interviewed individually at the state fair by Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds between August 11 and August 18, but Trump turned down her invitation.

Trump has been angered by her public neutrality in the primary race and her appearance with DeSantis at several of his Iowa events.

— AAP

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