Supreme Court lifted a temporary hold on Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to testify before a Georgia Grand jury about alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election. Lifting the temporarily hold, Graham must now answer questions with his own counsel on what if anything happened in Georgia in 2020. Georgia officials claim that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was subjected to undue influence from former President Donald Trump and Graham in 2020, allegedly asking Raffensperger to “find” extra votes for Trump. In the wake of the 2020 election, Republicans pressed election officials around the country to certify results, something Trump and his backers claimed involved widespread fraud. No matter what elections officials did, including recounts in certain states, it could never satisfy Trump’s backers insisting that massive voter fraud took place in 2020.
All the investigations of voter fraud did not confirm Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud, instead left election officials to certify President Joe Biden’s win over Trump. Trump’s confusion over what happened Nov. 2, 2020, Election Day, stemmed from his close confidants 62-year-old former Chapman University Law School Prof. John Eastman who wrote the Texas brief objecting to certifying the Texas results. Many of Trump, Eastman and Graham’s detractors, say that all three knew that they pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. But Eastman pointed out to Trump and his legal team that because of universal mail-in ballots, it was impossible to detect voter fraud, because the ballots came out of nowhere, were never certified valid, and added to the totals that handed Biden the election. So when it comes to voter fraud, many Trump backers believe that’s what happened.
Forcing Graham to testify to a Georgia grand jury isn’t like to get a satisfactory result. Graham, of course, will deny that he tried to influence Raffensperger to change the vote count. When Trump talked to Raffensperger in 2020, he wanted to know what happened to the 1,200 votes that would have put him over the top? Raffesnperger performed the state-mandated recount to found Biden still beating Trump by 1,200 votes . If Graham or Trump called Raffesnperger looking for missing votes, they were not asking the Secretary of State to make up votes. Graham and Trump legitimately wanted to know what happened to the votes found and lost that may have put Biden over the top, winning all of Georgia’s 16 Electoral Votes. Beating a dead horse in a Georgia grand jury, there’s no reason to subpoena Graham to testify because he’ll have nothing to add or subtract from the controversy.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas gave Graham the temporary reprieve from testify, now cleared by entire court to testify. Scheduled to testify Nov. 17, Graham won’t have anything new to add the grand jury’s investigation. Graham told the High Court that the Speech and Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution shielded him from testifying. But evidently only Clarence Thomas agree with Graham’s argument. Fulton County District Atty. Fanny Willis told all the justices that the delay in Graham testifying, “the delay resulting from the stay would be unavoidably harmful” to the Grand Jury Investigation. Willis will try to show that Trump and Graham tried to pressure Raffensperger to find additional votes to declare Trump the winner. Trump and Graham were only asking Raffensberger to find any legal votes that might have slipped through the cracks in the Georgia recount.
Willis has no smoking gun forcing Graham to testify before her grand jury. All that Graham would add to anything would be a statement that if votes went missing for Trump he hoped Raffensperger would find them, not, as Willis contends, asking the Secretary of State to manufacture votes. Democrats all over the country, led by the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, have tried to find anything to charge Trump or his associates with a crime in spreading the “Big Lie,” that Trump won the 2020 election. If you look at the big picture in 2020, given the universal mail-in ballots, there were plenty of good reasons, other than election fraud, why Trump lost the 2020 election. Democrats and the press blamed Trump for botching the response to the Covid-19 global pandemic. George Floyd’s May 25, 2020 police killing, also gave Democrats and the press a way to demonize Trump as a racist.
Adding it all up, Graham won’t have much to add to Willis’ grand jury investigating undue influence on Raffensperger to find more votes for Trump. All that Graham can say is that they campaign was dealing with allegations of widespread voter fraud, trying to see what happened with various secretaries of state around the country. If Trump or Graham had any conversation with Raffensperger, it wasn’t about making up or concocting votes, it was trying to find out what happened with legitimate votes lost in the shuffle. Democrats in Georgia like Stacy Abrams, currently running for governor, are absolutely convinced Trump and Graham tried to pressure Raffensperger to manufacture votes to put Trump over the top much like ipartisan members of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee, like Co-Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) think that Trump planned the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
