ATLANTA — Georgia, perhaps more than any other state in the nation, continues to be haunted by a sort of zombie campaign to produce a Trump victory, one month after Election Day.
Even though Gov. Brian Kemp has already certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, his fellow Republicans plan to hold a pair of State Senate committee hearings Thursday that are likely to dig into the question of whether the state’s election was, as President Trump falsely puts it, “rigged.”
Mr. Trump will soon be making his case in person. The president, who has berated Mr. Kemp and other local Republicans for not overturning Mr. Biden’s victory, will hold a rally on behalf of the state’s incumbent Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in Valdosta on Saturday ahead of a double January runoff that will determine the balance of power in the upper chamber.
On Thursday, Democrats announced that former President Barack Obama would host a virtual rally on Friday for the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue’s Democratic challengers. Mr. Obama will be joined by Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia legislator and candidate for governor who has championed voting rights in the state.
Many of the state’s Republicans continue to expend significant effort — and contort themselves into political pretzels — to navigate the president’s outrage over the fact that he lost the state, in the hope of demonstrating to his supporters that they are doing all they can to root out any trace of fraud to back Mr. Trump’s baseless claims.
For some Republicans, the most urgent concern is that the president’s ongoing effort to undermine faith in the election process will depress conservative turnout in the all-important Jan. 5 runoff races for the seats.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is up for re-election in 2022, is one of a number of top Georgia Republicans who are bending their actions to two diverging imperatives: defending the integrity of their state’s election while trying to survive the bizarre and evolving political weather systems generated by the mercurial Mr. Trump.
The president may spout conspiracy theories and acrimony — he has publicly attacked Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp for not acceding to his wishes — but he is also the most popular figure in the Republican Party.
Mr. Raffensperger, 65, most likely concerned about his future in politics, has tried to survive Mr. Trump’s onslaught with a mix of pushing back and staying in line.
On Wednesday, even as Mr. Raffensperger declared that Mr. Trump had lost, he made it clear that he was still a Trump man at heart: “We wish that our guy would have won the election,” he said, “but it doesn’t look like our guy has won the election.”
Mr. Kemp, who is also up for re-election in 2022, has followed a similar strategy. On Monday, in a tweet, Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp “hapless” and urged him to intervene in the election. That same day, Mr. Kemp’s campaign sent out an email declaring that Georgia Republicans “must unite as a Party to advance President Trump’s bold, conservative agenda.”
With President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. rolling out a steady list of picks for top jobs and Congress working to pass a compromise stimulus plan, much of Washington appears to be moving on from the election theatrics that unfolded over much of last month.
Even President Trump, while still challenging the results through the narrowing channels that remain, also appears to at least be considering next moves.
He made clear that he remained deeply committed to fighting the election outcome, releasing a 46-minute videotaped screed on Wednesday in which he spoke angrily and complained of a “rigged” vote. It came the day after his own attorney general, William P. Barr, said that despite inquiries from the Justice Department and the F.B.I., “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Still, Mr. Trump has been signaling that he may set his sights on becoming only the second president in American history to win another term after being defeated. He has also discussed steps he might take to insulate himself before the 2024 presidential election, such as pre-emptively pardoning members of his family before leaving office.
How serious he is remains to be seen. Many allies believe the president’s talk of another run in 2024, when he will be 78 years old, is more about maintaining relevance, enabling him to raise funds, soothe his wounded pride and try to shed the label of loser.
But even if it is only for show, Mr. Trump’s talk of a 2024 campaign has already frozen the Republican field and could delay the emergence of a new generation of leaders while keeping the party tethered to a politically polarizing figure for months or years.
Senator David Perdue, the Georgia Republican facing a runoff election that could determine the control of the Senate, made 2,596 stock trades in one term in office, including, at times, 20 or more transactions in a single day.
The number of trades far outpaced those made by his Senate colleagues, a Times analysis found. And the timing of some of them have raised questions about conflicts of interest, drawing attention to the senator’s investment portfolio just a few weeks before a highly consequential runoff election.
The Justice Department had investigated the senator for possible insider trading in his sale of more than $1 million worth of stock in a financial-analysis firm, Cardlytics. Ultimately, prosecutors declined to bring charges.
The Times analyzed data compiled by Senate Stock Watcher, a nonpartisan website that aggregates publicly available information on lawmakers’ trading. Mr. Perdue’s transactions -mostly in stocks but also in bonds and funds — accounted for nearly a third of all senators’ trades reported in the past six years.
The data also shows the breadth of trades Mr. Perdue made in companies that stood to benefit from policy and spending matters that came not just before the Senate as a whole, but before the committees and subcommittees on which he served.
As a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity subcommittee, Mr. Perdue cited a frightening report about hackers overseas that pose a threat to U.S. computer networks. The report was done by a California-based company called FireEye, a federal contractor with stock Mr. Perdue bought and sold 61 times since 2016. At one point he owned as much as $250,000 worth of shares in the company.
Ivanka Trump testified on Tuesday in a closed-door deposition as part of a lawsuit filed in January by the attorney general in the District of Columbia claiming that President Trump’s inaugural committee overpaid the Trump International Hotel in 2017.
The deposition is one of a series now underway after Attorney General Karl A. Racine of Washington, a Democrat, managed to beat back an effort in September by lawyers for the Trump inauguration committee and the Trump Organization to dismiss the case, which was pending in federal court in Washington.
Others deposed so far include Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a major donor to Mr. Trump and the chairman of the inaugural committee, and Mickael Damelincourt, the managing director of Trump International Hotel in Washington.
The lawsuit asserts that Ms. Trump was informed before the inauguration in January 2017 that the initial amount the hotel intended to charge the nonprofit inaugural committee — $450,000 a day — was considered too much.
Mr. Damelincourt then lowered the proposed charge to $175,000 a day for the rental of the hotel’s presidential ballroom, but documents suggest that this was still more than some staff members thought was reasonable.
Mr. Racine’s lawsuit says that even with this lower price, the inaugural committee “violated District law by exploiting a nonprofit to engage in self-dealing.” No details about the deposition were released. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former aide to the Trump family who helped organize the inauguration, is scheduled to give her deposition next week.
The lawsuit by Mr. Racine is a civil case. It is separate from an investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who conducted an inquiry into donors to the inauguration, which raised and spent at least twice as much as its predecessors, a total of more than $107 million.