trump s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. sources tell cnn that georgia prosecutors now have text messages and emails directly connecting trump s legal team to a voting system breach in coffee county, georgia in january 2021. this comes as the district investigating trump in georgia appears to be close to an indictment. fulton county district attorney fani willis is expected to seek charges against more than a dozen people. if she brings charges against the former president, it would be the fourth indictment of trump since being voted out of office. we have coverage of these new developments. isabel rosales is outside the fulton county court where security preparations under way. and we have cnn s zachary cohen with these new developments. zach, let s begin with you. tell us more about what you re learning and this new evidence.
interference case. security measures and law enforcement presence have noticeably increased around and in fulton county courthouse. in recent days. this also is fueling further speculation that an indictment is imminent. willis has previously said that any charging decisions regarding this matter will be announced before september 1st, which is just about two weeks away. and then, on top of that, this morning, cnn is reporting that georgia prosecutors have evidence the former president s legal team was directly involved with a voting system breach shortly after the 2020 election. this is really big news. according to cnn, prosecutors have emails and text messages that directly linked trump s team to the intent by local allies to access voting systems in georgia as early as january of 2021. now, nbc news has not independently verified this information, nor have we seen the messages cited in the report. but this is still very
of you in the studio. let s start first with this fulton county investigation. i m going to take everybody back to the beginning of the show, which is what we re expecting to get under way on monday with this potential fourth indictment. maria, sources are telling us that investigators now have emails, text messages connecting trump s allies with the coffee county voting system breach. how bad do you think this is for the trump team, because there s legally and there s politically. since we re in the politics panel, let s talk about the political side. so politically, for the republican primary, i think it helps him because as we have seen, the more that he gets dinged on the legal side with another indictment, with other proof that he knew that he had lost the election, his supporters do one thing, rally stronger around him. but where i do think it s going to hurt him politically is if he does make it through to become the nominee, which right now it
development linking trump s legal team to a voting system breach in a rural georgia county. zach, what can you tell us? reporter: fred, coffee county, georgia is heavily republican where trump won over 70% of the vote there. but after the 2020 election, allies of donald trump and his attorneys tried to get access to a voting system there and ultimately were successful in that. and these new text messages are in the possession of prosecutors now lay out that plan and connect trump s attorneys like sydney powell, rudy giuliani to this planning process and effort to get access to voting systems. it lays out how in the days before the breach, even before 2021, the attorneys were trying to get written information from a local official there. connecting some of the dots showing this was more of a top-down effort to get access
connecting members of donald trump s legal team to the early january 2021 voting system breach in coffee county, georgia. it s big. we ve known about the breach but had no idea that it could have been overseen or even the moving forces would have been so high up in the trump campaign. giuliani is about as high as you go. and it s a crime well, first of all, it s crimes many crimes when you have this sort of violation of computers, both new fangled computer laws and old fashioned trespass laws and it falls under the category what were they thinking? it s so plainly a violation. it s so plainly something that a campaign can t get involved in. and we might have thought before then it had been on the ground, people who didn t know one from the other, but giuliani, powell, that really puts it up very high. and the third point is, nothing