Trump Fluffer Sen. Lindsey Graham Will Have To Testify To Georgia Grand Jury, Eventually

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ special grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s election interference in Georgia issued a subpoena to Trump Fluffer Sen. Lindsey Graham for his own phone calls to Georgia election officials.

I believe it is the fist time in U.S. history that a sitting member of the U.S. Senate has been subpoenaed by a criminal grand jury. If the DOJ is actually investigating the Coup Plotters responsible for the insurrection on January 6, I suspect that it will not be the last. Lookin’ at you Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Josh Hawley.

Graham says he will fight the subpoena, but he has no grounds on which to do so. He will  be forced to testify to the Georgia speical grand jury, eventually. The Georgia judge overseeing the grand jury has already rejected state legislator’s claims of immunity from testimony, and he seems like a judge who will not suffer Graham’s nonsense.

It should be noted that Sen. Graham was in no way acting in his official capacity as a U.S. Senator – so the “speech and debate clause” has no applicability – he was reaching out to Georgia election officials as a surrogate of the Trump campaign, for which there is no privilege or immunity from testifying.

Note: What keeps getting left out of reporting is that the grand jury judge has already found that there was a multi-state effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Sen. Graham openly discussed how he also contacted election officials in Arizona and Nevada as well. Graham says he also spoke to officials in Arizona, Nevada about election:

Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday that he had spoken to officials in Arizona and Nevada about his concerns over mail-in voting in the 2020 election, a day after Georgia’s chief election official accused him of suggesting that some legally mailed ballots be discarded.

“Yeah, I talked to Arizona, I talked to Nevada,” the South Carolina Republican told reporters in the U.S. Capitol, adding that he was speaking with the officials in his capacity “as a United States senator who’s worried about the integrity of the election process.”

He was reaching out as a surrogate of the Trump campaign. He is full o’ shit.

Pressed later on whether he had spoken specifically with the secretaries of state in Arizona and Nevada, Graham — a top congressional ally of President Donald Trump — said he “talked to [Arizona] Gov. [Doug] Ducey, and I can’t remember who I talked to in Nevada. But what I’m trying to find out is how do you verify mail-in ballots.”

So when can Gov. Doug Ducey expect to receive a subpoena from the Georgia grand jury?

Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University, Dennis Aftergut a former federal prosecutor, and Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-authored its report on Georgia’s Trump investigation (and Trump’s potential criminal liability), explain an op-ed, Is a senator exempt from giving testimony in an election fraud probe? –YES.

Why is a local prosecutor dragging Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) into a Fulton County, Ga., grand jury?

On July 5, the judge overseeing a special grand jury approved a subpoena of Graham as part of an investigation into whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to corrupt the state’s role in the national election and steal the franchise of millions of Georgia voters.

Graham’s lawyers say the grand jury is a “fishing expedition.”

We say it’s anything but. From the perspective of a constitutional scholar, a criminal defense lawyer and a former federal prosecutor, the subpoena poses a big question for our democracy: Will the rule of law prevail — or are there some people who are just too important to ask to cooperate with a lawful state investigation into whether outsiders tried to use illegal means to overturn the results in a presidential election?

@NormEisen, @DennisAftergut and I explain in @PostOpinions why @LindseyGrahamSC can howl, but he can’t hide from the grand jury investigating Trump and his gang’s attempt to steal Georgia’s 16 electoral votes and the votes of millions of Georgianshttps://t.co/UYIxVZpKfr

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 9, 2022

At center stage is a set of rules from the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. It provides that in all cases “except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace,” senators and representatives “shall not be questioned” outside of Congress “for any Speech or Debate in either House.”

The clause helps protect lawmakers’ freedom to express their thoughts and positions in the legislative process. But the immunity those rules confer is limited, or bounded, as lawyers say, to ensure that lawmakers do their jobs and not the bidding of external forces with potentially criminal goals of their own. Such as holding onto power regardless of the people’s will.

Graham, a lawyer himself, might or might not have been part of a criminal caper to mess with Georgia’s duly cast and fairly counted millions of ballots to help Trump steal the state’s 16 electoral votes. The Georgia judge approving the seven subpoenas issued on July 5 described the evidence as indicating “multi-state, coordinated efforts” to influence the November 2020 election results in Georgia and elsewhere.

Graham’s precise role remains unclear. We do know that in Trump’s call on Jan. 2, 2021, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the then-president pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that did not exist — just enough to overturn the election. The hope was that flipping the outcome in Georgia would trigger similar actions in other battleground states and in sufficient numbers to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s electors four days later, on Jan. 6.

Graham telephoned Raffensperger on Nov. 13, 2020. The grand jury is entitled to hear sworn testimony about what was behind that call, what Graham sought by making it and who said what to which Georgia officials.

The same is also true for his call to Gov. Doug Ducey and whoever it was that he called in Nevada.

Raffensperger has said that in that call, Graham “questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state,” as The Post reported. Raffensperger asserted that he understood the South Carolina senator to mean that the Georgia official should “‘[l]ook hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’”

Graham has contested that account. Which interpretation reflects the truth? That’s for the Georgia grand jury to determine, by hearing all relevant testimony. The rule of law requires that those responsible for attacks on our nation’s democracy be held to account.

Graham can try to claim exemption under the constitution’s speech and debate clause, but, as an experienced attorney and lawmaker, he has surely read its words. The Supreme Court has long held that the provision’s specific language means that lawmakers such as Graham cannot use the clause as a pass to avoid testifying about crimes.

On July 6, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued a careful ruling denying claims parallel to what Graham is expected to argue. They were made in that case by Georgia state legislators seeking to quash their own subpoenas from the same grand jury. The court correctly cited Gravel v. United States, a 1972 Supreme Court case, as holding that the speech and debate clause does not “immunize a Senator or aide from testifying at trials or grand jury proceedings involving third-party crimes where the questions do not require testimony about or impugn a legislative act.”

The Georgia court also has made clear that the privilege ends “when a witness (or his staff) has engaged with [non-legislators] on topics relevant to the grand jury’s investigative charter.”

The central question in cases involving legislative privilege is whether requiring a lawmaker’s testimony would undermine the legislative function. By calling Raffensperger, Graham looks to have been engaging in political activity [campaign surrogate] well outside any proper legislative function and, therefore, beyond the privilege’s protection.

Graham’s appearance before the grand jury is important not only to understanding the full extent of what happened in the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It also matters to a core tenet of our constitutional democracy. No one, including a senator or a president, is above the law.