The news that the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, has spoken to Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of the criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election highlights the pride of place the Peachtree State enjoys among the threats facing President Trump.

Georgia is the only state where the former president faces potential criminal charges of both the state and federal varieties. Mr. Kemp, who is set to be a pivotal figure in determining Mr. Trump’s future, has already testified before the grand jury convened by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, who is conducting her own probe into the last presidential election.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp allowed that “our office has been contacted by Jack Smith’s office” but declined to comment further. He joins the former governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, in contributing to Mr. Smith’s investigation. One of Mr. Kemp’s deputies, Secretary of State Bradley Raffensperger has likewise spoken to both Ms. Willis’s grand jury and Mr. Smith’s team.     

Mr. Trump famously chafed at losing Georgia by a narrow margin in 2020 and urged both Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Kemp to help him reverse the result. His efforts included his call to Mr. Raffensperger asking him to “find” the needed votes in order for Mr. Trump to carry the state. Mr. Raffensperger demurred. It is these efforts by Mr. Trump to sway state officials to turn the vote in his favor that are at the center of probes by Ms. Willis and Mr. Smith.

Mr. Kemp told CNN with respect to Mr. Trump that “he was mad at me. I was not mad at him. I told him exactly what I could and couldn’t do when it came to the election, and I followed the law and the Constitution. And as I’ve said before, that’s a lot bigger than Donald Trump. It’s a lot bigger than me. It’s a lot bigger than the Republican Party.”

After Mr. Kemp refused to help overturn President Biden’s win, Mr. Trump in 2022 backed a rival for the governor’s mansion, David Perdue, formerly a senator. Mr. Kemp beat him handily, and then he bested for a second time the same Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams, who herself questioned the integrity of Georgia’s vote in 2016. Georgia has two Democratic senators.

Soon after Mr. Kemp’s victory over Ms. Abrams, he appeared before Ms. Willis’s  grand jury. He had previously spent a year endeavoring to quash or delay her subpoena, insisting that an appearance during an election year would constitute interference, a species of the argument that Mr. Trump has offered in response to the range of charges he faces out of, thus far, New York and Florida.

Although Mr. Kemp responded to Ms. Willis’s subpoena, he is no ally of the prosecutor, who has promised a charging decision on Mr. Trump by September. The governor signed legislation in May allowing state commissions to remove district attorneys and their deputies for “willful misconduct” or “persistent failure to perform his or her duties.” Ms. Willis has called the law “dangerous” and “racist.”

Word of Mr. Kemp’s parley with Mr. Smith’s office comes as the Guardian reports that Ms. Smith is mulling racketeering charges against Mr. Trump. That would require establishing the existence of an “enterprise” and a “pattern of racketeering activity.” Ms. Willis has made racketeering charges central to her prosecutorial practice. 

When it comes to racketeering charges, Ms. Willis has an advantage over Mr. Smith — Georgia’s statute is more expensive than the federal version. In the state, attempting and soliciting a crime can be counted as predicate acts toward a racketeering charge, even if those actions are not crimes themselves. 

An analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institute reckons that “the Trump campaign may be a potential ‘enterprise’ that could be subject to prosecution.”

In a February letter to Mr. Kemp from Ms. Willis, she outlined that potential charges could include “solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”

The Guardian adds to that list allegations of computer trespassing arising out of Coffee County, in southeastern Georgia, where Mr. Trump bested Mr. Biden by more than 40 points. Records produced in response to a subpoena show that one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys, Sidney Powell, was billed $26,000 by computer experts from an Atlanta-based company, SullivanStrickler, to copy data from the county’s voting machines. 

In Georgia, computer trespassing is a felony punishable by 15 years in prison and/ or a fine of $50,000. Complicating efforts to charge it, though, could be footage of local election officials assisting Mr. Trump’s allies in gaining access to the data. Court filings explain that Ms. Powell’s team “imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment.”

Mr. Kemp told CNN last week that he will “certainly” endorse whoever secures the Republican nomination for president in 2014, even if it is Mr. Trump.