Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (R) on Thursday testified before a special grand jury investigating former President Trump’s fruitless efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the battleground state, according to multiple reports.
In reality, Raffensperger’s testimony left the courthouse after more than five hours later by another exit, avoiding reporters, the AP reported.
Did the AP actually report the following?
Let’s hope this pebble dislodges some others and then a boulder or two. This summer needs to be a landslide…
The investigation, led by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, looks into whether the former president’s attempts to pressure Georgia officials to subvert the election results may have been criminal.
Given the evidence in this case, coupled with the inability of TFG to do much of anything about it, might this finally be our winner in securing a richly deserved conviction? I hate to get hopeful, but I’m almost slightly hopeful a little bit.
What could he possibly have had to say?
Lemme guess…the poor little guy exhibited all manner of indications he suffers from advanced dementia and an obsessive compulsive fixation with the number 5…
The AP should hire TPM commenters.
Well, here is their opportunity to tell the truth to keep Trump occupy with something else and hopefully Fani Willis will make him mad enough to leave them alone. Yeah, one can hope.
His expectation and the reality seem to differ based on reporting but it’s not clear what Raffensperger meant by “short” so perhaps he was not that surprised. But it’s also not clear why it would take four hours to confirm the sequence of events: was he being evasive, pleading the fifth, or …?
I guess if you haven’t broken the law you don’t have to challenge subpoenas.
Indeed.
Betting against the 5th, as that usually makes things go rather quickly.
Here’s hoping Brad hasn’t gotten back on the Trump Train, and instead, throws his party’s dear leader under the bus.
Apparently it was substantial enough to walk out on its own.
Five hours from walking in to walking out doesn’t seem like that long. We’ve all heard snippets of recording or read partial transcripts, but I expect he had to testify verifying the recording, explain why he recorded in the first place, who was with him, who he knew or believed to be on the other end of the call, what he understood to have been said etc. Even a really simple course of events takes a long time if you have to lay it out in legally-solid detail.
I think the only question is when the indictment comes down, and maybe who gets named in addition to tfg.
They have the tapes that Raffensburger released of his phone call with Trump.
The trouble is that attorneys mostly don’t work very hard and they mostly don’t work long hours. When they screw up a filing, it gets caught by the other side and/or the judge, and then they have the opportunity usually to refile/appeal, whatever. So, they mostly aren’t very good at their jobs because there are no negative repercussions to getting things wrong. Screw up? No problem: that’s more billable hours for fixing the screw-up and refiling/appealing or whatever.
It’s really rediculous that this is taking so long and that Raffensburger has had to answer questions for 5 hours. You can bet that they started out with “where do you live, your background, your education” and on and on and on. Why? More billable hours.
Expand on this and you see why it’s taken 1.5 years to have any hearings, and why it’s taking so long for anything to happen on Trump’s obvious racketeering attempt in Georgia. Rico anyone?
Why? What would he have to worry about? He was pretty up front about all of it at the time, and he won his primay last month. This would be a pretty freakin’ weird time to start trying to walk back everything he already said.
I suspect a lot of time was spent on minute details of the phone call along with replays of various parts of the call, plus details on how the election process is supposed to work and what the ramifications would have been if DT’s call had been successful. There’s no reason to think BR would have taken the 5th after everything he has already said, and as someone pointed out, that probably would have shortened the testimony considerably.
ETA: @paulw beat me to it.
Imagine you have access to his voicemail and email…
I do not believe you are an attorney.