Government

Court Dropkicks Lindsey Graham's Opening Bid To Hide His Effort To Ratf*ck Georgia's Election

He did nothing wrong. That's why he can't talk about it.

By  
on
Senators Meet With Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett

(Photo by Demetrius Freeman-Pool/Getty Images)

If Sen. Lindsey Graham didn’t want to find himself hauled into court in Georgia, he shouldn’t have inserted himself into Georgia politics. Instead, he called up Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to urge him to help Trump win the state’s 16 electoral votes. Twice.

Which is how Graham wound in the distinguished company of Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis when the grand jury investigating the plot to interfere with its electoral votes handed out certificates of material witness last week.

Yes, we know, it’s not a subpoena. But it’s not good, and Graham immediately vowed to fight it.

“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,” his lawyers Bart Daniel and Matt Austin of Nelson Mullins huffed.

“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.”

Which is true, as far as it goes, and indeed Graham does not appear to be the subject or target of the grand jury investigation. But Raffensperger and his deputy Gabe Sterling remember Graham as unsubtly pressuring them to find a way to toss out enough Democratic ballots to put Trump over the top, and they already testified, both to the Georgia grand jury and to the January 6 Select 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.

Sponsored

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the investigation, replied that “My inquiry and the Jan. 6 inquiry are not one and the same.”

“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,” she told WSB-TV in Atlanta.

Judging by the shrieking hissy fit the senator threw during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, we’re guessing that a moment of quiet reflection is not in the cards. So the DA has taken steps to ensure his compliance otherwise.

Last week, Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, who is overseeing the special grand jury, ruled that Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan and state Senator William Ligon could not hide behind legislative privilege to avoid testifying to the grand jury.

“[T]here is no ‘senator-constituent’ privilege — in particular when those communications are relevant to possible third-party crimes,” the court wrote, ordering the two state politicians to testify about their role in efforts to interfere with the vote count in Georgia two years ago. As we noted, this augured poorly for Graham, who has no role in tabulating Georgia’s votes and thus has even less basis to argue that he was fulfilling his legislative duties on the call to Raffensperger.

Sponsored

Similarly, Judge McBurney’s reference to a Supreme Court holding which forced Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel to testify about his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers would seem to foreclose Graham’s reliance on the Speech or Debate Clause to get him out of going under oath. (Although, with stare decisis honored more in the breach these days, who even knows.)

WSB-TV is now reporting that Judge McBurney issued a similar order in response to an effort by Graham’s lawyers to block the subpoena. While the order itself has not appeared online, the station says that the court held that “Lindsey Graham is a necessary and material witness” and ordered him to show up in August.

Enforcing the not-a-subpoena on an out-of-state witness will require many more steps, and may depend on whether the DA seeks aid from a court in South Carolina or DC. But it’s clear that Graham’s opening gambit to get out of saying under oath what he did to ratf*ck Georgia’s electoral votes failed — bigly.

Judge orders Sen. Lindsey Graham to testify for special grand jury in Trump election probe [WSB-TV]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

, , , ,