Fani Willis is in the hot seat. The district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, became a national figure last year when she indicted Donald Trump and 18 others in a RICO case for trying to “unlawfully change the outcome” of the 2020 election. She racked up several early successes by winning plea deals from four of the indicted, including three of Trump’s lawyers (Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Kenneth Chesebro). And the case appeared to be moving smoothly toward a trial; then allegations about Willis emerged.

Earlier this month, a lawyer for Mike Roman, a longtime Republican operative charged as a co-conspirator, submitted a filing alleging Willis had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a lawyer hired by Willis to work on this prosecution, and that the two had taken vacations together for which Wade had paid the bills. Roman’s attorney argued that this presented a conflict of interest, that Willis ought to be disqualified, and that the case should be dropped against Roman. Trump’s legal team subsequently filed a similar complaint.

Ever since, the headlines about the Georgia case have been dominated by stories about Willis and Wade. It’s uncertain at this point whether Willis committed any ethics breaches that could legally impact the prosecution. But this mess could affect how her case is viewed by the public. It’s unfortunate, for this is perhaps one of the most important criminal cases in American history. That point is made clear in the excellent new book being released today by two veteran investigative journalists, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman: Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election.

Find Me the Votes tells the inside story of the Georgia RICO case. The book places all the shenanigans and alleged crimes committed by Trump and his fellow election-subverters into a real-life page-turner. It provides full-picture profiles of the key characters, including Willis. If you want to understand her—and her current troubles—this book will help. It is the most comprehensive account of how Trump and his henchmen attempted to steal the election in Georgia and elsewhere.

I was able to pull a few strings and grab Isikoff and Klaidman for a pre-publication interview, in which they talked about some of the best parts of the book and shared their views of Willis’ present controversy. Obvious interest declared: I’ve written two books with Isikoff (Russian Roulette and Hubris), and Klaidman is a friend.

DC: There are a lot of legal entanglements for Donald Trump. Why did you focus on this case?

MI: Georgia was ground zero for arguably the most anti-democratic plot in American history. It was the state he cared most about. It is where you see the most concentrated efforts of the then-president and his allies to overturn the results of the election—with real consequences for real people.

DC: Why was he so obsessed with Georgia over the other states?

DK: The principal reason may be that Georgia was always safely in the Republican column. When he was told he had lost it, he flipped out and couldn’t accept that. Georgia became an emotional focal point for this whole battle. There’s another element: We know that Trump focused largely on urban centers with largely black populations: Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee. And he put Fulton County (Atlanta) in that category. On social media, he complained that Fulton County was corrupt and that vote stealing was endemic there. We saw how he talked about the Georgia election workers who he victimized, people like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. He called them scammers and corrupt.

MI: Trump referred to Freeman and Moss 18 times in that famous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he requested that Raffensperger “find” him 11,780 votes. He was obsessed with these two African American women, whom his chief lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had smeared, making all sorts of accusations about them that were debunked.

DK: Trump believed that because Republicans controlled all the levers of power in Georgia—the executive branch and the legislature—he would have the most leverage there. An interesting part of this story is the iron wall that was put up by Republicans in Georgia to resist Trump’s efforts, from Brian Kemp, the governor, to Chris Carr, the attorney general, to Raffensperger, and lots of other Republicans.

DC: Trump and his defenders in the GOP and the conservative media have been dismissive of this case, challenging the legal theory and the use of the state’s RICO statute. In your book, you say there is a “compelling logic” to the case. Please explain.

MI: The logic is that it all happened in Georgia on Willis’ turf. Everyone involved in January 6—they show up first in Georgia: Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Trump himself, Sidney Powell. They were all deeply involved in trying to overturn the results in Georgia. As we discovered, the efforts to commit election fraud in Georgia went far beyond what has been revealed to date, even beyond what’s in the House January 6 report. One example: Powell, the election-denying and conspiracy-theorist lawyer who was in constant touch with Trump. They were calling each other. She was feeding him videos. She was planning—and this is first reported in our book—criminal break-ins across the country into election offices to get Dominion voting machines so she could prove her ridiculous theory about Venezuelan socialists planting secret algorithms into the machines. She was drawing up lists of what she called “hunting licenses,” which were preemptive presidential pardons so operatives could commit these break-ins. They were never issued. But those plans did result in a criminal break-in in Coffee County, Georgia, and that’s one of the many counts in the Willis indictment.

DK: The scope of alleged criminality lends itself to a wide-ranging racketeering indictment. You have the lying to government officials, the break-in at Coffee County, the threats against Freeman and Moss and many others, the fake electors scheme, and multiple other acts.

DC: It seems to have taken Willis well over two years to file charges. Why so long?

MI: News of the Trump-Raffensperger phone call breaks on January 3, 2021, the week she takes office. She was coming into an office in chaos. Thousands of unindicted murders, rapes, and assaults were backed up, and she had a responsibility to deal with them. Also, she didn’t get a whole lot of cooperation from anyone in Georgia. Not even Raffensperger was willing to cooperate. He demanded to be subpoenaed. Other people took the same position. She had a hard time of finding people to help her handle the case because of the threats from Trump. She reached out to Roy Barnes, a former Democratic governor of the state, who turned her down, saying, “Do you want to have a bodyguard following you around for the rest of your life?” She tried to recruit a top former federal prosecutor, Gabe Banks. He, too, turned it down. His wife was concerned about the threats his family would receive. It took a while, and she ultimately ended up with Nathan Wade.

DC: In the Trump era, so much craziness comes at us, as if from a firehose, and it’s tough to keep track of it all. Your book gives the reader a chance to absorb all the almost-unbelievable chicanery that occurred as part of Trump’s crusade to overturn the election, and you also add to the list of the bizarre.

MI: In the book, we describe the command center set up in this South Carolina plantation called Tomotley, owned by Lin Wood, the much-celebrated trial lawyer who had become a full-blown QAnon devotee. He had gone completely off the rails. He had been tweeting about Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Jeffrey Epstein and pedophiles and all the QAnon craziness. At this command center, there’s Powell, former national security adviser Mike Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. They’re plotting to reverse the election. And a former CIA guy gives them a video of a former security guard to Hugo Chavez, who talks about remembering that eight years earlier he was at a meeting with Chavez and executives of election firms, and they supposedly schemed to transfer an algorithm that could be used to flip votes. Powell gets excited. She gets the video. She talks to Trump at the White House and says, “I got the goods.” She has a chartered plane fly the video to the White House. While they’re doing this, the Trump campaign vets this and sees it’s completely ridiculous. Trump’s own campaign debunked these allegations, yet Trump talked about them constantly.

DK: The extent to which QAnon was a driver of the Stop the Steal movement has not been fully appreciated. Lin Wood was a representative of that close relationship between QAnon and Trump World. And it’s not just weird; it’s consequential and dangerous. Wood’s hate-filled rhetoric fueled by his QAnon beliefs encouraged a torrent of violent and hateful threads on social media that terrorized people. And Wood was recruited by Donald Trump Jr. to be the face of the Trump campaign’s efforts in Georgia. President Trump was calling him regularly and cheering him on. The extent to which Trump was working hand in glove with these extremists is not fully known.

DC: To recap: You have a sitting president in communication with a crazy QAnoner who is promoting a conspiracy theory that foments demonization and potential violence. If that’s not absurd, I don’t know what is.

MI: One more piece of this we report in the book is that Ron Watkins was Zooming in to Tomotley to talk to Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and—.

DC: Ron Watkins was the guy who administered the platform where QAnon, the unidentified supposed Deep State insider, posted his baseless messages encouraging folks to believe Democrats and others were part of global cabal that engaged in pedophilia. Some people think Watkins posted as QAnon. Now, as you report, he was involved with Flynn and the others, as they hatched their plans to overturn the election. This is even crazier.

DK: And there are real consequences. We’ve mentioned the threats to Freeman and Moss. But there’s another case: a young Dominion tech worker, an immigrant from a North African country. Watkins tweeted out a video of this guy working on his laptop and said this Dominion tech worker was manipulating data. It was total nonsense. But Watkins unleashed all the QAnon followers on this guy. They doxxed him online, which led to a flood of death threats. There was a GIF on social media of a noose swinging in front of his house. It was this episode that prompted an outraged Gabe Sterling, the chief of operations for Raffensperger, to hold a press conference to call on Trump to stop his hateful rhetoric and fearmongering, saying someone is going to get killed.

DC: Let’s turn to that infamous phone call when Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes for him to win the state. Your book tells the story of how this phone call came to be taped.

MI: It’s one of the most remarkable stories in the whole saga. This phone call was secretly taped by a young woman named Jordan Fuchs, who was chief of staff to Raffensperger. She muted herself on the call. No one knew she was on it. She set up the call at the request of then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. There was a great deal of reluctance on Raffensperger’s part to even get on the phone with Trump because the Trump campaign was suing him. But it was a direct request from the president. Fuchs realized the risks her boss would be taking if he got on the phone with Trump. On her own, without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped it. The transcript then ended up in the inbox of a Washington Post reporter.

This was arguably the gutsiest and most consequential action of the entire post-election contest. Had it not been for this, we would not have the words that have been prominently used in Willis’ indictment and special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference indictment against Trump. One reason you don’t know about this is because Fuchs has declined to talk about it. She was in Florida visiting her grandparents when this call happened, and she discovered afterward that Florida is a two-party consent state, meaning you need the permission of all the parties on the call to record it. This gave her potential legal exposure. But she was given immunity when she was called to testify before the Fulton County special grand jury. She is one of the unheralded heroes of this entire story.

DC: It’s another indication of how in a fragile system its fate can turn on the actions of a small number of individuals. Let’s end with the elephant in the room: Willis’ relationship with Wade. What do you make of it? Are you surprised by it? How will it impact the case?

DK: There’s no question this was a huge lapse in judgment on her part. We interviewed her many times over the course of two years, which led to our nuanced portrait of a complicated and very human person. She is a force of nature in many ways, a larger-than-life character, whose flaws can sometimes seem as large as her strengths. Is she corrupt? I don’t think so, based on the evidence we have seen. Did she have an ethical blind spot? No question. What we did see in reporting this book is that she has a touch of arrogance. She’s a trial attorney, and one of the best who has ever graced the courtrooms of Fulton County. And trial attorneys can carry themselves with a certain bravado.

MI: No question this was a lapse of judgment. That said, none of this in any way affects the validity or strength of the case or legally has any consequence for the case. There’s no indication that Michael Roman’s constitutional rights were in any way violated or that prejudice was shown against him or any other defendants, including Trump. The theory of the conflict of interest is that somehow because Willis was paying Wade and they were going on trips together that they had a vested interest in prolonging the case so they could make more money and take more trips. There’s not a shred of evidence that’s what they were doing. This should be kept in perspective. I know a thing or two about sex scandals. [Editor’s note: Isikoff was the first reporter on the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky story.] And this is about as tame as you can get. A 52-year-old single woman dating a 50-something single man estranged from his wife for more than three years—we’re really going to be scandalized that two adults are having a consensual relationship? Things might have gotten overheated regarding this.

I could have spent much longer with Isikoff and Klaidman discussing Find Me the Votes. It is a riveting book that takes us far behind the media reporting on one of the most consequential criminal cases in US history. But there’s an easy way for you to learn more: Read the book.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.