Georgia grand jury subpoenas Giuliani, Graham and other members of Trump’s legal team

The district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, has dramatically expanded her investigation into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, issuing subpoenas to Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and five members of Trump’s legal team, including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

Acting on a petition from District Attorney Fani Willis, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney signed off on the subpoenas, declaring that each of the individuals is a “necessary and material witness” with “unique knowledge” of the conduct under investigation, according to court records made public on Monday and reviewed by Yahoo News.

The subpoenas direct that each of the witnesses show up in Atlanta next Tuesday, July 12, to testify before a special grand jury, although, given the short notice, their appearance on that date is considered unlikely.

Coming barely a month after a special grand jury began hearing testimony in the case, on June 1, the subpoenas indicate that Willis “is not dragging her heels” and that her investigation is moving forward at a rapid pace, said Norman Eisen, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee.

“This flurry of subpoenas demonstrates that she has substantially completed her in-state portion of her investigation and she’s now moving briskly to take evidence from those outside Georgia who may have participated in the alleged conspiracy within that state’s borders,” he said.

The Fulton County investigation into Trump’s post-election activities has attracted far less attention than the investigations by the House Jan. 6 select committee or the Department of Justice, which recently appears to have stepped up the pace of its own probe, subpoenaing multiple Trump allies who met in secret at state capitals on Dec. 14, 2020, to declare themselves the legitimate electors, despite the fact that Joe Biden had already been certified as the winner in those states.

But in the view of some legal commentators, Willis’s probe may currently represent the most serious – or at least the most imminent — legal threat to Trump. In a recent interview with Yahoo News, Willis said she hoped the grand jury could be “in and out in 90 days” and that “in a perfect world, I think we can finish in July, August.”

The grand jury is charged with writing a report recommending to Willis whether Trump and his associates should be indicted. But Willis’s prosecutors are already facing legal challenges. Georgia Republican legislators who have been subpoenaed to testify about questionable testimony about voter fraud delivered by Giuliani are already resisting in court on the grounds of legislative immunity. The new subpoenas are almost certain to draw a new round of court challenges, with Giuliani and the other lawyers claiming that they are unable to testify on the grounds that their legal work for Trump is covered by attorney-client and other privileges.

“I’d be shocked if any of them show up,” said Randy Evans, a prominent Atlanta defense lawyer who has represented Trump in the past.

But as Eisen pointed out, the attorney-client privilege is not absolute. A federal judge in California has already ruled against Eastman in his attempt to withhold some of his emails from the Jan. 6 committee, concluding that it was “more likely than not” that Trump was engaged in a criminal scheme to obstruct a proceeding from Congress and that therefore Eastman’s emails should be released as “crime fraud exception” to attorney client privilege.

Whether Willis will be able to make that case against the newly subpoenaed witnesses is unclear. Since all of the targeted individuals reside outside Georgia, the subpoenas have been delivered to out-of-state judges who can enforce them but will preside if the witnesses seek to invoke privileges that would allow them to avoid testifying. At a minimum, that could lead to separate legal fights that delay Willis’s hoped-for timetable.

Asked for comment, Robert Costello, Giuliani’s lawyer, responded in an email with a single sentence: “We have not been served with a subpoena.”

At its start, Willis’s probe was centered on the hourlong phone call that Trump placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2020, during which he urged the state official to “find” one more vote than was needed to flip Georgia’s 16 electoral votes from Biden to Trump. But the new round of subpoenas illustrates that Willis’s probe has extended beyond that call in an apparent effort to build a much broader conspiracy case that could be prosecuted under the state’s expansive racketeering law.

The subpoena to Giuliani, for example, cites his testimony before state legislative committees in December 2020, during which the Trump lawyer touted as a “smoking gun” a video that purportedly showed Fulton County workers taking out “suitcases” of fraudulent ballots on election night. In fact, both state and federal investigations concluded that the video provided no evidence of anything improper.

Other Trump lawyers who were subpoenaed include Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Jacki Deason, all of whom worked on either Giuliani’s testimony to the state Legislature or on a plan to secretly select alternative electors pledged to Trump from Georgia, despite Biden’s victory in the state. The subpoenas cite these actions as “part of a multi-state coordinated” effort by the Trump campaign “to influence the results of the Nov. 2020 election.”

The subpoena to Graham cites two phone calls he made to Raffensperger after the election in which he questioned the Georgia official and his staff “about reexamining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for President Trump.” Graham, according to legal experts, is likely to challenge the subpoena on the grounds that it violates the “speech and debate” clause of the U.S. Constitution that generally protects lawmakers from having to testify about their official actions. When first reported, Graham’s spokesman, Kevin Bishop, said the senator was simply seeking information about how the voter verification process worked in Georgia and “never asked the Secretary of State to disqualify a ballot cast by anyone.” Graham did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.