When the foreperson of a Georgia grand jury investigating allegations of election interference by former President Donald Trump and his advisers gave a series of highly public — and highly unusual — interviews this week, she suggested that the case might soon be headed toward indictment.

Three other criminal inquiries involving Trump have also been progressing relatively quickly — if not quite as fast — in recent months, with the Justice Department pressing forward in Washington and a local prosecutor moving ahead in New York.

No former president has ever confronted the barrage of legal threats that Trump now faces, all of which appear to be heading toward decision points by authorities in coming months. Heightening the stakes, the inquiries have intensified just as Trump has started ramping up his third campaign for the White House.

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Beyond the Georgia case, Trump is under investigation by a special counsel in Washington for his role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election and for his potential mishandling of classified documents. At the same time, local authorities in New York are looking into whether Trump authorized and was involved in falsely accounting for hush money payments to a pornographic film actress who said she had an affair with him.

Even though much about the inquiries seems straightforward — “It’s not rocket science,” the foreperson in Georgia, Emily Kohrs, told The New York Times — each of the cases is layered with its own array of legal complexities that make predicting an outcome difficult. And that is to say nothing about the potential complications of bringing charges in the midst of a presidential campaign against a pugnacious figure like Trump, who has long assailed attempts by authorities to hold him accountable as hoaxes and politically motivated witch hunts.

Here is a look at the status of each of the criminal investigations confronting Trump.

Georgia: Election Interference

The Georgia investigation presents two areas of exposure for Trump.

One is his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of alternate presidential electors, even after Georgia’s results were recertified by the state’s Republican leadership. “We definitely talked about the alternate electors a fair amount,” Kohrs said.

The other centers on phone calls Trump made to pressure state officials after the election, including one in which he told Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes — one more than Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state.

The decision about whether to charge Trump will ultimately be made by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, who has been investigating the case for the past two years. Willis’ office has said it is considering everything from conspiracy and racketeering to narrower charges, such as criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.

The special grand jury that Kohrs served on produced a report last month after hearing testimony since last June, but most of the report has been kept secret. In an interview this week, Kohrs said the grand jurors had recommended that several people be indicted on a range of charges, but declined to provide names before the full report was released.

In the small portion of the report that was released, jurors said they saw potential evidence of perjury by “one or more” witnesses. But Kohrs said the jurors appended eight pages of criminal code citations to their report, hinting at its breadth.

A number of legal experts have said Trump faces significant jeopardy in the Georgia inquiry.

“His risk of being charged was already substantial even before the grand jury report excerpts,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment trial. “The foreperson’s comments make that virtually certain.”

Special Counsel: Overturning the Election

The Justice Department has been asking questions for more than a year about Trump’s sprawling efforts to overturn the election and whether he committed crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The investigation — one of two inherited in November by the special counsel, Jack Smith — has used a variety of methods and has gathered an enormous amount of information.

Federal agents have seized cellphones and other devices from pro-Trump lawyers including John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark — as well as from one of Trump’s chief congressional allies, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa.

Prosecutors have issued grand jury subpoenas to several state Republican officials and to dozens of Trump administration lawyers and officials. Those include Mark Meadows, Trump’s onetime chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence, who presumably would have knowledge of the former president’s thoughts and behavior in weeks before Jan. 6. In the most recent sign the investigation is continuing apace, Smith has issued subpoenas to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Investigators have also been poring over thousands of pages of interviews conducted by the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, which recommended that Trump be prosecuted for crimes including inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of a proceeding before Congress.

One of the chief strands of the inquiry has focused on the plan to create false slates of pro-Trump electors in swing states actually won by Biden, mirroring one element of the Georgia investigation. Federal investigators have also been scrutinizing broad claims by Trump and his allies that the election was marred by fraud, and a series of payments made by Save America PAC, Trump’s chief postelection fundraising vehicle.

Smith’s office has been tight-lipped about his plans, although several people familiar with the investigation have said that prosecutors could complete their work by spring or early summer. The process has often been slowed by time-consuming litigation as witnesses such as Pence have sought to avoid or limit their grand jury testimony with various legal arguments.

It remains unclear if Smith will ultimately indict Trump. But several legal experts — including Timothy J. Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney who led the House’s Jan. 6 investigation — have said that the key to bringing charges is obtaining clear-cut evidence that Trump intended to break the law.

“When we started to see intentional conduct, specific steps that appear to be designed to disrupt the joint session of Congress, that’s where it starts to sound criminal,” Heaphy told the Times this week. “The whole key for the special counsel is intent.”

Special Counsel: Classified Documents

The investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents began in earnest last May with a subpoena. It sought the return of any classified material still in his possession, after he had voluntarily handed over an initial batch of records that turned out to include almost 200 classified documents.

Within a month, a lawyer for Trump, M. Evan Corcoran, gave investigators more than 30 additional documents in response to the subpoena. Around the same time, another lawyer, Christina Bobb, asserted that a “diligent search” had been conducted at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, assuring prosecutors there were no more documents with classification markings.

But the inquiry took a dramatic turn in August when acting on a search warrant, the FBI descended on Mar-a-Lago and discovered more than 100 additional classified documents. The affidavit submitted by the Justice Department in seeking the search warrant said that investigators had “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be discovered.

Pence and Biden have also faced scrutiny for having classified materials in their possession — in Biden’s case, a separate special counsel investigation is underway. In the case of Trump, prosecutors have focused on a few key questions: Did Trump knowingly remove the sensitive records from the White House and did he willfully hold on to them in violation of the Espionage Act? Moreover, did he try to hinder investigators from figuring out why or where he kept them?

To answer those questions, prosecutors have interviewed several junior aides to Trump and compelled grand jury testimony from more senior aides such as Kash Patel.

They have also sought to force Corcoran to testify fully in front of the grand jury. Corcoran tried to avoid answering questions by asserting attorney-client privilege on behalf of Trump. But prosecutors have sought to pierce that privilege with the so-called crime-fraud exception, which can be invoked when there is evidence that legal advice or services have been used in furthering a crime.

It remains unclear whether Smith will bring charges in this inquiry either. While no evidence exists at this point that Biden or Pence have sought to obstruct investigations into their own handling of documents — both brought their possession of the documents to the attention of the Justice Department — the parallel probes have complicated the political landscape and could give Trump a reason to cry foul if he is charged and the others are not.

Manhattan District Attorney: Stormy Daniels

The investigation into Trump’s role in paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels has spanned five years, two Manhattan district attorneys and multiple grand juries.

But recently, prosecutors under the current district attorney, Alvin Bragg, appear to have moved closer than ever to indicting the former president. Last month, they began presenting evidence to a newly seated grand jury, which has heard from several witnesses as the office lays the groundwork for potential charges against Trump.

The case would likely center on whether Trump and his company falsified business records to hide the payments to Daniels in the days before the 2016 election.

But an indictment — let alone a conviction — is hardly assured.

Any prosecution of the case would rely on testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who made the payment to Daniels and who pleaded guilty himself in 2018 to federal charges. Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 he paid out, and according to court papers in Cohen’s case, Trump’s company falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses.

In New York, it is a misdemeanor to falsify business records. To make it a felony, prosecutors would need to show that Trump falsified the records to help commit or conceal a second crime — in this case, violating New York state election law, a legal theory that has not been tested.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing and lashed out at prosecutors for leading what he calls a partisan witch hunt against him. He has also denied having an affair with Daniels.

Under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a far broader case focused on Trump’s business practices, including whether he fraudulently inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars to secure favorable loans and other benefits.

But in the early weeks of his tenure last year, Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case and halted the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignations of two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.

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