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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is throwing a party, and all the lawyers are invited.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution was first to report that the grand jury investigating candidate Trump’s effort to overturn President Biden’s win in Georgia issued subpoenas to attorneys John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis, as well as to Senator Lindsey Graham and podcast host Jacki Pick Deason, an attorney for the Trump campaign who hosts a podcast on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and is married to GOP megadonor Doug Deason.
The 23-person special grand jury sitting in Atlanta spent June hearing from witnesses about multiple attempts to steal the state’s 16 electoral votes and award them to Trump. The resulting subpoenas focus on three facets of the Trump campaign’s plan to thwart the will of Georgia voters.
Of particular interest to the grand jury is a December 3, 2020 hearing before the Georgia Senate, in which Giuliani, Deason, Eastman, and Ellis presented widely debunked claims about election fraud, showing a video of election workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta producing what they falsely claimed was a “suitcase” full of fraudulent ballots. The panel also seeks information on phone calls in December and January where Trump and Graham sought to pressure state election officials to decertify Biden’s electoral win. And finally, investigators are looking at the plan to swear in a slate of fake electors to substitute for the real ones as part of John Eastman’s harebrained coup plot, which he cooked up with Chesebro, an election lawyer from Wisconsin.
The subpoenas for Giuliani and Ellis note that, although the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office immediately debunked the State Farm video, the president’s pro bono lawyer “made additional statements, both to the public and in subsequent legislative hearings, claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the November 2020 election and using the now-debunked State Farm video in support of those statements” as part of a “multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
The subpoena for Deason notes that she “personally presented and narrated selected portions of the State Farm video to members of the Georgia State Senate,” where Eastman is reported to have “provided testimony, during which he advised lawmakers that they had both the lawful authority and a ‘duty’ to replace the Democratic Party’s slate of presidential electors, who had been certified as the duly appointed electors for the State of Georgia after the November 2020 election, due to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud within the state.”
Not exactly conduct becoming an officer of the court.
And speaking of unbecoming conduct, we’ve all heard the infamous phone call where the sitting president pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” making multiple references to an innocent election worker, whom he called “a professional vote scammer and hustler” and implicitly threatening election officials, saying, “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.” Cleta Mitchell, at attorney with a long history of advocating for Republicans and against gay people, got yeeted out of Foley & Lardner approximately 10 minutes after it emerged that she’d participated in that call.
According to the subpoena for Senator Graham, he made two similar phone calls in which he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election in Georgia, consistent with public statements made by known affiliates of the Trump Campaign.”
The subpoena for Chesebro provides a concise description of the Trump campaign’s effort to work with the Georgia GOP to corral a slate of cosplay electors and submit a fraudulent electoral certificate to the National Archives:
As part of those efforts, the Witness worked with the leadership of the Georgia Republican Party, including Chairman David Shafer, in the weeks after the November 2020 election in Georgia, at the direction of the Trump Campaign. This work included the coordination and execution of a plan to have 16 individuals meet at the Georgia State Capitol on December 14, 2020, to cast purported clectoral college votes in favor of former President Donald Trump, even though none of those 16 individuals had been ascertained as Georgia’s certified presidential electors by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. The Witness drafted at least two memoranda in support of this plan, which were provided to the Georgia Republican Party, and the Witness provided template Microsoft Word documents to be used by the Georgia Republican Party at its meeting on December 14, 2020. Further, the Witness indicated in communications with the Georgia Republican Party that he had worked directly with Trump Campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani as part of the coordination and execution of the plan.
According to the AJC, Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who is overseeing the special grand jury and signed off on the subpoenas, is crafting a framework for the DA to question legislators who have claimed immunity. Looks like the judge will be crafting a whole bunch of frameworks for all the lawyers getting engraved invitations from the DA.
About damn time!
Fulton grand jury subpoenas Giuliani, Graham, Trump campaign lawyers [AJC]
Subpoenas
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.
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