Georgia’s prosecutor tried to get several Republicans in Georgia to testify before a grand jury about alleged attempts to interfere in Georgia’s elections, which includes the U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.
The South Carolina Republican has been fiercely fighting the order to testify, and while he hasn’t gotten out of it entirely, he did get a temporary win on Sunday.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the subpoena at Graham’s request Sunday, after a federal district court judge in Atlanta turned down the South Carolina Republican’s bid to avoid testifying on the grounds that the local grand jury is intruding on legal protections he enjoys as a federal lawmaker.
The appeals court said in a two-page order that Graham’s attorneys and prosecutors for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis needed to flesh out arguments about whether Graham is entitled to have the federal courts place legal guardrails on the questioning Graham could face. The 11th Circuit panel’s order said that those arguments should be presented first to U.S. District Court Judge Leigh Martin May, who issued a ruling last week rejecting the arguments Graham’s team raised under the Constitution’s speech or debate clause — which immunizes lawmakers from most legal consequences for actions relating to their lawmaking responsibilities.
Investigators want to ask Graham questions about the two conversations he had in Georgia with election officials late 2020. They were at the exact time that Trump tried to subvert his defeat. Graham has acknowledged discussing with the officials the state’s process for counting absentee ballots.
Graham was involved in Georgia and it has all been a disaster since then. Prosecutors in the state have been on the warpath, trying to be the ones to finally nail Trump on something criminal in the 2020 election debacle, and they anticipate Graham’s testimony will get them closer to that goal.
The temporary stop comes just weeks after prosecutors from the Peach State cancelled a recording of a sworn statement with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and demanded that he appear in person testimony in the middle an election. Graham should be suspicious of these prosecutors who are more interested in politics than the law.
By the by, this is the same prosecutor that a judge had to discipline for investigating someone and then appearing at a fundraiser for that person’s political opponent.
Fulton County Superior Judge Robert C. I. McBurney was critical of Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis’s hosting of a fundraiser to support Charlie Bailey, the Democratic rival for GOP state senator Burt Jones.
Jones is the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor who has also been notified by Willis’ office that he is one of several targets of the special grand jury investigating former president Donald Trump for election interference.
Democrats use this to create a political mess and try to make it worse.