Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis subpoenaed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and a lead investigator of 2020 election matters to appear at a hearing for Mark Meadows next week, according to court documents filed Thursday.
The hearing, which will take place in federal court in Atlanta on Monday, will center around a request from Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, to move Willis’s case against him from state to federal court.
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Meadows is one of 19 co-defendants named in Willis’s indictment of Trump and is facing two felony charges, including racketeering, for his alleged illegal efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Willis’s demand that Raffensperger and Frances Watson, the former chief investigator in the secretary of state’s office, appear at Meadows’s hearing comes after she subpoenaed two Trump attorneys, Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufman, to also appear for it.
The subpoenas shed some light on how Willis plans to argue that Meadows’s case should remain under her purview within Fulton County.
Her indictment detailed interactions between Meadows and Raffensperger’s office, including an infamous phone call Meadows was part of on Jan. 2, 2021, during which Trump asked the secretary to “find 11,780 votes” to put him in a position to win Georgia’s election, which he narrowly lost.
The phone call is detailed in the indictment as one of 161 acts that, Willis said, were “interrelated” and amounted to a violation of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
In addition to the phone call, another act involved Meadows sending a text message to Watson asking, “Is there a way to speed up Fulton county signature verification in order to have results before Jan. 6 if the trump campaign assist financially?”
Willis’s subpoenas follow the district attorney rejecting a request from Meadows this week to extend the deadline for him to voluntarily surrender to Fulton County jail, which Willis set for Friday afternoon, until after his hearing on Monday. Meadows also filed an emergency motion with the court to prevent his arrest.
A federal judge agreed with Willis and denied the motion, indicating Meadows would need to surrender to the jail by Friday and that his hearing for his case to be moved to federal court would proceed as scheduled on Monday.
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Meadows now appears prepared to turn himself in based on a consent order filed Thursday afternoon showing he had reached an agreement to be released after his booking on $100,000 bond.
Meadows has argued that he was acting in his capacity as a federal official when assisting Trump in the aftermath of 2020 and that his case is therefore eligible for federal removal.
