Lindsey Graham must testify in Georgia probe of effort to overturn 2020 election, judge rules

A federal judge on Monday denied the request of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to quash his subpoena in Georgia prosecutors’ investigation into potential criminal interference in the 2020 presidential election by President Donald Trump and his allies, signaling he must testify in the probe.

Graham had argued that he should be exempt from testifying because of speech or debate clause protections, sovereign immunity and his position as a high-ranking government official. U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May rejected all three arguments.

“The Court finds that the District Attorney has shown extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections,” the judge wrote.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, D, requested a special grand jury earlier this year. It began meeting in June and has identified more than 100 people of interest. The panel has already heard testimony from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, R, and his staff; Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr, R; state lawmakers and local election workers.

Graham is of interest to the committee for phone calls he made to Raffensperger about Georgia’s election system. Willis claims Graham made multiple phone calls to Raffensperger and his staff after the election requesting that they reexamine certain absentee ballots “to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former president Donald Trump.”

Graham’s office had no immediate response on Monday.

Graham’s lawyers previously said that their client’s calls about reexamining specific absentee ballots after Trump’s loss wasn’t an effort to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. The conversations were about Georgia procedures, his lawyers wrote in court papers filed in South Carolina in July.

Graham’s legal team is led by former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn.

Willis named Graham, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, in her investigation of various Trump-allied individuals into what she deemed “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”

Willis launched the probe in the weeks after the Trump campaign and its allies placed calls to Georgia officials seeking to overturn the election results. The case covers some of the matters reviewed by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and by the Justice Department inquiry examining efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. But Willis, 50, has been at the forefront in publicly pursuing a criminal case, in part because she is able to take advantage of state statutes that legal experts say could make a criminal prosecution faster and less cumbersome than a federal case.

She has subpoenaed more than three dozen individuals - including a group of Georgia Republicans she has identified as targets of the criminal probe for their role as purported Trump electors.