Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis asked a judge to demand Republican Senator and fainting couch enthusiast Lindsey Graham appear before a grand jury investigating allegations of election tampering, saying in a motion that the only way Graham’s claim of protections from the Constitution’s “Speech and Debate” clause can be reasonably applied if all other facts of the case are dismissed.

Graham claimed that his call to Georgia elections officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the department’s Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling was part of the legitimate legislative function of a US Senator.  Graham, who represents South Carolina, does not have any authority over state elections operations in Georgia, nor can he propose legislation in Georgia.

Graham made multiple calls to Georgia officials in December 2020 as Donald Trump publically and privately pressured Republican Georgia election officials to “find 11,780 votes” that would swing the state from a Joe Biden victory to Trump’s ledger.  Graham claims his calls were to investigate claims of election fraud to determine if he could support Georgia’s official state of electors to the Electoral College. 

In the motion to compel Graham’s testimony before the Fulton County grand jury, prosecutors note that the only way to accept that interpretation of events is to ignore all other testimony that has been given in the case and to accept Graham’s claim as gospel.  The law, prosecutors claim, demands that Graham come to testify about the specific legislative function he was addressing in calls to Raffensperger and Gabriel, in which Graham reportedly urged the two officials to dismiss official, certified results, which the two Georgia officials have addressed publicly.

The Senator argues that there is ‘no conflict of legally material fact’ regarding his phone calls to Secretary Raffensperger.The District Attorney does not understand this assertion, since these facts are defined by conflict and have been since they first became public knowledge in November of 2020. To say that ‘neither the pleadings1 nor the public record’ indicate any material factual conflict is bizarre, unless you consider only the Senator’s pleadings and statements in the public record. In order to find the pleadings bereft of material conflict, one would have to completely discard the Certificate of Material Witness, ignore the public statements of Secretary Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, and accept a generous interpretation of Senator Graham’s own public statements. This would leave only the Senator’s assertions that, as a Senator and Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, his explanation of his actions ends the inquiry.