Trump's 'Big Lie' Allies Like to Talk about It Everywhere but on the Stand in Georgia

One of the new and unbreakable maxims of American politics would seem to be the iron rule that Fani Willis Did Not Come To Play. The Fulton County district attorney in Georgia keeps taking the former members of the upper echelons of Camp Runamuck to court, and she keeps beating them all like tin drums. From the Washington Post:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) has said that her inquiry is examining “the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.” Because Meadows does not live in Georgia, she could not subpoena him to testify but filed a petition in August for him to do so. South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Edward Miller ruled Wednesday that Meadows must comply with a subpoena as his testimony is “material and necessary to the investigation and that the state of Georgia is assuring not to cause undue hardship to him.”

Willis’ latest victory seems more than anything like the second prong of a pincer movement by law enforcement concerning the attempts by the former president* to ratfck election results in 2020. The northern prong is the Department of Justice’s attempt to force former White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Patrick Philbin to testify about the former president*’s actions on January 6 itself.

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According to her office’s submission to the court, Willis wants to question Meadows about his involvement in the Georgia mishegas.

Willis wrote that she also was interested in testimony regarding a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting Meadows attended at the White House with Trump and others “to discuss allegations of voter fraud and the certification of electoral college votes from Georgia and other states.” Willis also noted in the petition that on Dec. 22, 2020, Meadows “made a surprise visit” to the Cobb County Civic Center in Marietta, Ga., where the Georgia secretary of state’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were conducting an audit of signatures on absentee ballots. There, Meadows “requested to personally observe the audit process but was prevented from doing so because the audit was not open to the public,” Willis wrote.

I’m sure that this action will end up in the same legal corn maze as all the others for a while. But I remain optimistic that, sooner or later, one of these apparatchiks will become so exhausted, physically, mentally and/or financially, from the effort of covering for a criminal ex-president that they will lay down their burden at the feet of Willis and/or Merrick Garland. And DA Willis is not coming to play, at all.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has his three children.