WASHINGTON — A Georgia judge is holding a public hearing Thursday on GOP Gov. Brian Kemp’s effort to quash a subpoena asking him to testify before a grand jury investigating attempts to influence the 2020 election.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney is holding the hearing at 10:30 a.m. ET, which he had announced last week after officials in the state Attorney General’s Office filed a motion asking the judge to throw out the subpoena.
In reaction to the scheduling of the hearing, Kemp’s office said the governor had already expressed a willingness to cooperate with the investigation and to “provide a full accounting of his very limited role in the issues being looked at by the special grand jury.” But because November’s elections are approaching, the statement said, it didn’t have the “time necessary to prepare and then appear” to provide testimony. Instead, his aides asked the judge to allow the governor to appear after the election.
Citing executive and attorney-client privilege, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr alleged in a legal filing last week that District Attorney Fani Willis was pursuing Kemp’s testimony for improper political purposes. Carr said Kemp’s testimony can wait until after the polls close, since the investigation is about the 2020 election and not the 2022 election.
“Instead, through artificial deadlines, the DA’s office has engineered the governor’s interaction with the investigation to reach a crescendo in the middle of an election cycle. Unfortunately, what began as an investigation into election interference has itself devolved into its own mechanism of election interference,” Carr wrote.
Carr argued that because the grand jury was authorized through May of next year, the “conclusion of the investigation before the November 2022 election is unnecessary. Furthermore, such an unrealistic and unnecessary timeline is discouraged by prosecutorial ethical standards since the integrity of the 2022 election is not at issue.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
