“The Court finds that the District Attorney has shown extraordinary circumstances and a special need for Senator Graham’s testimony on issues related to efforts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections,” the judge wrote.
Fulton County District Attorney Fannie D. Willis (D) requested a special grand jury earlier this year. It started meeting in June and has identified more than 100 people who are interested. The committee already includes Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger (R) and his staff, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R) has heard testimony from state lawmakers and local election workers.
Of interest to the committee were phone calls Graham made to Raffensberger about Georgia’s election system. Willis said Graham made several phone calls to Raffensberger and his staff after the election “requesting some absentee ballots to be reconsidered to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump.”
Graham’s office had no immediate comment Monday.
Graham’s attorneys previously said their client’s calls to reconsider certain absentee ballots after Trump’s defeat were not an attempt to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. The conversations are about the Georgia procedures, his attorneys wrote in court documents filed in South Carolina in July.
Graham’s legal team is led by former Trump White House counsel Donald McCann.
Willis, who named Graham, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, investigated various Trump-friendly individuals in what he deemed “a multi-state, coordinated scheme by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
Willis launched the investigation just weeks after the Trump campaign and its allies called on Georgia officials to reverse the election results. On January 6, 2021, the case included some material reviewed by the House Select Committee investigating the insurgency and a judicial inquiry investigating attempts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. But Willis, 50, has been a public leader Pursuing a criminal case takes advantage of state laws that legal experts say can make a criminal case faster and more cost-effective than a misdemeanor.
He has identified more than three dozen people, including Georgia Republicans, as targets of the criminal investigation. Supposedly Trump voters.
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