If you thought the House Select Committee Investigating Jan. 6 was thorough, keep your eye on the Georgia special grand jury investigating the interference in the 2020 presidential election—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is not playing around.
The special grand jury convened by Willis has asked for testimony from a slew of top Donald Trump associates, from his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to Sen. Lindsey Graham, and now the latest, ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and notorious conspiracy theorist, disgraced attorney, and Trump campaign advisor Sidney Powell, POLITICO reports.
According to a petition filed Aug. 19, Willis’ office has requested Meadows appear for testimony on Sept. 27.
“0n December 21, 2020, [Meadows] attended a meeting at the White House with former President Trump, members of Congress, and others to discuss allegations of voter fraud and the certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other states,” the filing reads.
Additionally, “[Meadows] confirmed this meeting in a Tweet on December 21, 2020, when he stated, ‘Several members of Congress just finished meeting in the Oval Office with President @realDonaldTrump, preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud. Stay tuned.’’’
Here’s that tweet, which Meadows has left in place:
According to the motion, Meadows unexpectedly appeared in Marietta, Georgia, on Dec. 22, 2020, where the Georgia Secretary of State and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were “conducting an absentee ballot signature match audit.” Meadows asked to watch the audit process, but was refused.
Meadows then sent emails to Department of Justice officials, “including Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, making various allegations of voter fraud in Georgia and elsewhere and requesting that the Department of Justice conduct investigations into these allegations,” the petition reads.
The petition also details the infamous recorded phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where the former president asked him to find him 11,780 votes. “[Meadows] actively participated in and spoke on the call, and the Special Purpose Grand Jury’s investigation has revealed that the Witness was involved in setting up the call.”
POLITICO adds that Willis’ office is also seeking testimony from Powell.
The petition lays out a timeline of a meeting in Dec. 2021, where disgraced Atlanta attorney and Trump lap dog L. Lin Wood hosted a meeting at a South Carolina plantation “for the purpose of exploring options to influence the results of the November 2020 elections in Georgia and elsewhere.”
The motion offers that Wood identified Powell, Michael Flynn, ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan as all attending the meeting. Wood added, per the petition, that Powell offered “to assist in identifying Georgia residents who would be willing to serve as plaintiffs in Georgia election contest lawsuits.”
In June 2022, Powell gave testimony to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. In her testimony, Powell stated that “In the weeks after the November 2020 election, former President Trump asked her ‘to be special counsel to address the election issues and to collect evidence, and he was extremely frustrated with the lack of law enforcement by any of the government agencies that are supposed to act to protect the rule of law in our republic.’”
On Aug. 16, 2022—two months after Powell’s testimony to the Jan. 6 committee—the motion notes that:
“Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it is currently assisting the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office with an investigation into an alleged breach of elections data in Coffee County, Georgia. Publicly reported e- mails indicate that [Powell] coordinated with Sullivan Strickler, data solutions company, to obtain elections data from Coffee County, Georgia, in early January 2021. There is further evidence in the public record that indicates that [Powell] was involved in similar efforts in Michigan and Nevada during the same time period.”
Also being asked to testify is cyber researcher James Phil Waldron.
According to the petition, on Dec. 3, 2020, Waldron “appeared at Georgia State Senate subcommittee meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, where he testified about purported vulnerabilities of the Dominion Voting Systems voting machines used throughout Georgia during the November 2020 election.”
The motion adds that Waldron was “part of a team that briefed lawmakers using PowerPoint presentation titled ‘Options for 6 JAN’,” and offered in his testimony that he had met with Meadows “multiple times” after the 2020 election “to discuss claims of election fraud.”
Additionally, Waldron says he “attended a meeting with former President Trump and state legislators from Pennsylvania on November 25, 2020, to discuss claims of election fraud.” Waldron later met with Giuliani and Sen. Graham.
After attempting to playing the sick card but failing to persuade the Georgia judge, Giuliani appeared in Atlanta just last week to give testimony to the grand jury. He was accompanied by attorney Robert Costello and pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Vernon Jones, Daily Kos’ Lauren Sue wrote.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham was also ordered to appear before the special grand jury, but he’s been fighting tooth and nail to get that subpoena quashed.
In his latest brief, filed Aug. 24, Graham reasons that the subpoena is invalid, based on a rarely used section of the U.S. Constitution.
“The Constitution guarantees that a Senator ‘shall not be questioned’ about his protected ‘Speech or Debate’—and yet the District Attorney insists that Senator Graham must submit to questioning to ascertain whether he can be questioned or is immune from questioning. That makes no sense,” Graham’s motion reads.
Willis asserts that Sen. Graham’s testimony is vital to interpreting “a multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere,” The Washington Post reports.
On Thursday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s attorneys were in court attempting to quash a subpoena for his testimony to the grand jury. No decision has been made in Kemp’s case.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
