Kindly Judge Orders Lindsey Graham To Bring Ass To Georgia Grand Jury, Please And Thanks

Just another Republican who thinks he gets to pick and choose what he complies with.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) was ordered by a judge in Fulton County, Georgia, Monday to get his senatorial carcass to Atlanta next month to testify before a grand jury in an investigation of Donald Trump's attempt to interfere with the state's vote count in the 2020 election.

Graham was one of eight TrumpWorld characters — including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Jenna Ellis — subpoenaed by the grand jury last week to testify about the attempted ratfuckery. Wonkette's law-talking person, Liz Dye, points out at Above the Lawthat formally, Graham et al received "certificates of material witness" last week, but we'll keep saying "subpoena" because it's so easy to spell and also works as a noun and a verb.

We will add that the phrase "TrumpWorld characters" made us think of the worst possible theme park, where folks in giant fiberglass heads of Trump administration figures — it's such a large cast! — greet giddy MAGA people, and maybe if it's the big fiberglass Stephen Miller, they take sobbing children away from their parents. We're not looking for venture capital at this time.

Also, whatever you call the document, Graham's attorneys insisted last week he doesn't have to comply with it, because he doesn't think Fulton County DA Fani Willis's investigation is legitimate. Why, yes, that's pretty much what sovereign citizens try to get away with, and it never works.

In a statement, attorneys Bart Daniel and Matt Austin groused that he doesn't have to testify as a witness, because

Fulton County is engaged in a fishing expedition and working in concert with the January 6 Committee in Washington. Any information from an interview or deposition with Senator Graham would be immediately shared with the January 6 Committee.

As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Graham was well within his rights to discuss with state officials the processes and procedures around administering elections.

Here is a thing about the American legal system, though: The legitimacy of a grand jury subpoena (even a certificate of material witness) is actually not something the recipient gets to decide!

That would be why Monday, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney ordered Graham to knock off the shenanigans and testify on August 2, writing that the "court finds that Lindsey Graham is a necessary and material witness" in the grand jury's investigation.

Graham is not himself a target of investigation (at this moment in time), but would be a very useful material witness, since he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — twice! — shortly after the election to ask Raffensperger to see if he couldn't, you know, help out Trump by disqualifying enough mail-in ballots to hand the state to Trump. So we can see why that would be important for the grand jury to hear about, if only so they could congratulate Graham for suggesting a different way to steal the election than "finding" additional votes for Trump.

As Liz notes over at Above the Law, Raffensperger and his top deputy, Gabe Sterling, have already testified to the grand jury (and to the January 6 committee), so "mayhaps the South Carolina senator is reluctant to allow the panel to compare his version of events about those calls with the versions they’ve already gotten on record."

Also too, Fulton DA Fani Willis told Atlanta TV station WSB last week, following the statement from Graham's attorneys, that as a matter of fact, "My inquiry and the Jan. 6 inquiry are not one and the same," which you would think is pretty clear except to grandstanding dipshits.

Willis added that she hoped that Graham would just for chrissakes testify without dragging all this out in court, saying,

It is my hope that Sen. Graham will have a moment of quiet reflection and decide to bring truthful testimony before this grand jury that wants to hear from him on some very important issues.

We aren't entirely certain that Graham has "quiet reflection" as part of his operating system, which mostly runs on either the Craven Fawning or Dishonest Pretended Outrage settings. But it was a kind gesture on DA Willis's part, and now that there's a judicial order involved, we'll have to see how all this plays out in the courts.

You'd think a grand jury subpoena/certificate of material witness wouldn't really be open to question, but with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, we might find out that Republican senators actually have the ability to decide for themselves which laws and court orders apply to them.

[ WSB-TV / Above the Law / NBC News / Photo:  Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0 ]

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