Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis has filed a 15-page response to U.S Senator Lindsey Graham's motion to "quash" a subpoena ordering him to appear before the grand jury investigating Donald Trump's attempts and those of his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Willis dissects and obliterates Graham's motion point by point, accusing him of merely re-submitting his original arguments which the court has already rejected. She also destroys Graham's central argument, that his telephone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had a "legislative purpose."
"Provided with an opportunity to demonstrate to this Court that his subpoena should be narrowed or partially quashed, Senator Graham has decided to once again argue that every avenue of inquiry available to the Special Purpose Grand Jury requires quashal," Willis writes in the motion posted by Politico's Kyle Cheney.
"Because Senator Graham largely repeats the same arguments he has already presented, he has failed to respond to this Court’s own findings," Willis writes.
"The most glaring example of this is the heart of the Senator’s position: that his phone calls to Secretary Raffensperger were, by the nature, inherently legislative acts, and the Special Purpose Grand Jury’s inquiry actually only contemplates the phone calls. This is precisely the opposite of what this Court has found: 'the specific activity at issue involves a Senator from South Carolina making personal phone calls to state-level election officials in Georgia concerning Georgia’s election processes and the results of the state’s 2020 election. On its face, such conduct is not a ‘manifestly legislative act.'"
Willis then uses Graham's grandstanding against him.
"Senator Graham explicitly told reporters that he had tried to persuade Raffensperger to adopt a different method of signature verification, one which the Senator preferred to the method being used at the time in Georgia. He went further to say that he wanted to discuss how Raffensperger could make the process 'better,' explicitly not for some future legislative purpose, but to alter either the ongoing recounts or the upcoming Senate runoff elections."
And while she does not indicate a conspiracy, Willis carefully notes that "Senator Graham was not the only person with signature verification on their minds on November 13, 2020. On the very same day that the Senator called Secretary Raffensperger, attorney Lin Wood filed a filed a federal suit against Raffensperger and the Georgia State Election Board."
"Still later on that same day," Willis adds, "former President Trump tweeted 'Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is [Governor Brian Kemp]?' Secretary Raffensperger did not fail to note the significance of a lawsuit by one of the former president’s allies being filed on the same day as telephone calls from the Senator, another of his allies, followed by a statement by Trump himself, all focusing on the same issue."
Willis also quotes the well-known former Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Walt Schaub, saying: "On its face, [Senator Graham’s] explanation suggests misconduct. Any call by a sitting chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to a state election official during an ongoing count of votes is inherently coercive and points to an attempt to influence the outcome of the ballot counting."
Schaub concludes, "the conduct Senator Graham has admitted is deeply troubling. There can be no legitimate reason for the Judiciary Committee’s chairman to call a top election official regarding an ongoing vote count."