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.”
The ruling was confirmed Wednesday by Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Willis. DiSantis said Meadows would not be called until after the midterm elections.
An attorney for Meadows said Wednesday there is a possibility of an appeal or additional legal action.
“There may be additional proceedings before the trial judge before any decision is made about an appeal,” said Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger.
Meadows, who served four terms as a congressman from North Carolina before becoming Trump’s White House chief of staff, has helped promote Trump’s baseless claims that widespread voter fraud delivered the presidency to Joe Biden. Meadows has said he now lives in South Carolina, though he registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a North Carolina mobile home.
In her petition seeking Meadows’s testimony, Willis wrote she was interested in 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 state.”
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 absentee ballot signature match audit.
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.
The Georgia grand jury has so far heard testimony from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) and his staff, Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R), state lawmakers and local election workers. The state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, filed a 121-page motion in August seeking to kill a subpoena requiring his testimony.
