In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis recently obtained a court sign-off on pursuing testimony from Mark Meadows, the former Republican Congressman who was Donald Trump’s chief of staff at the time of the Capitol riot.
The terms of the court order call for Meadows’s appearance for Willis’s investigation in September. In the course of Trump’s attempts to stay in power, Meadows was repeatedly involved in election subversion efforts that in some way involved Georgia, where Biden won. At one point, the then-White House chief of staff even showed up to the site of a then-ongoing audit of signatures submitted with mail-in ballots in Cobb County, which is in the Atlanta metropolitan area. (The audit, like every other credible investigation of the election, found no evidence of systematic fraud.) Willis cited Meadows’s surprise visit to Cobb County in making the case for hearing from him.
As noted in the district attorney’s filing, Meadows and the Trump team provided no substantial advance notice to local authorities that the then-White House official would show up. Once in Cobb County, Meadows wanted to personally view the audit process, which local authorities declined to allow. The audit wasn’t open to the public.
Meadows was also involved in the infamous phone conversation between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021. On the call, the then-president relentlessly pushed false claims of election fraud to Raffensperger, demanding action from the state official’s side. “The Witness actively participated in and spoke on the call, and the Special Purpose Grand Jury’s investigation has revealed that the Witness was involved in setting up the call,” Willis’s filing says. (She was referring to Meadows.) The phone conversation between Trump and Raffensperger, in which others besides Meadows were also involved, was one of the original, high-profile points of concern that sparked Willis’s investigation. Willis is seeking testimony from Meadows on September 27. Willis was seeking a document called a Certificate of Need for Testimony Before Special Purpose Grand Jury covering Meadows, and she successfully got Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney’s backing.
While squaring off with prominent Republicans including Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Georgia GOP Governor Brian Kemp in court over demands for their testimony, Willis is also now seeking testimony from attorney Sidney Powell. McBurney also signed off on pursuing testimony from Powell, from whom the district attorney is pushing to hear on September 22. Trump once named Powell as a part of his post-election legal team, and she was involved in an array of efforts after the 2020 presidential election to overturn its outcome. In pursuing testimony from Powell, Willis noted in court that she was involved in the pursuit of data from elections systems in locales including Georgia’s Coffee County.
Paul Maggio, the chief operations officer at a tech firm that repeatedly worked on pro-Trump efforts to obtain and examine elections data, kept Powell updated about the Coffee County effort, in which Trump supporters gathered copies of almost the entirety of the county’s electronic voting system. Later, Maggio evidently agreed to provide the data for Powell’s side. What happened in Coffee County went through unofficial channels. More bluntly, it was a covert operation to obtain guarded data for the purpose of pushing conspiracy theory-driven election lies, putting the security of the elections system at risk. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Raffensperger’s office are examining the situation. Willis is conducting a broad criminal investigation into pro-Trump election interference.
