Willis, who has been fighting efforts by a Senate committee that wants her to appear under subpoena, has agreed to talk with them on Dec. 17, her lawyer, former Gov. Roy Barnes, said at the hearing.

The dispute stems from Willis’ decision to pursue criminal charges against Donald Trump and his allies after they disputed the outcome of the 2020 election.

Republicans in the legislature issued two subpoenas, once last year and again this year.

A lower court ordered Willis to comply, but she appealed to the state Supreme Court, prompting Tuesday’s hearing.

Republicans say they want to explore what led Willis to prosecute Trump before he became president for a second time.

Democrats have derided the Senate’s work as a political stunt, an assertion that Barnes, a Democrat, repeated outside the courthouse.

He noted that several members of the Senate Special Committee on Investigations are running for statewide office.

“They’re putting out fundraising [that] says ‘we’re going to go after Fani Willis, and you need to send me $100.’ I mean, that’s ridiculous. It is in bad faith,” he said.

Five of the committee’s members are running for higher office. The Chairman, Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, wants to be Georgia attorney general.

Four others, also Republicans, are running for lieutenant governor, although one of them, Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon, announced hours before the court hearing that he was resigning immediately to focus on his campaign.

Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, serves on the committee and is also among those running for lieutenant governor. He attended the hearing and said afterward that the Supreme Court would not have had to listen to the lawyers argue about subpoena power if it were not for Willis’ “stonewalling” the committee.

“I think the question for her is how much of this is political,” Dolezal said. He said Willis benefitted politically from the media coverage.

“The case was unfounded from the very beginning,” he said. “It was rooted in its core in a scheme of prosecution for personal profit and we need to ensure that lady justice indeed keeps her blindfold on.”

Willis indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants.

Four took plea deals, but the rest were cleared last month when a special prosector dismissed the case after Willis was sidelined due to an ethical issue.

The courts removed her from the case because she had employed a romantic partner to help prosecute it.

Barnes downplayed that.

“If they disqualify every member of the General Assembly that has a romantic relationship with a secretary or a lobbyist,” he said, “you’re not going to be able to have a quorum next session.”

Lawmakers return to the Capitol to conduct another round of state business on Jan. 12, though some will be back next week to hear Willis testify.

The post Fulton prosecutor to testify about Trump case, despite effort to fight subpoena appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

Go Deeper: GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will leave Congress after five turbulent years (CNN)

During her nearly 14-minute interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” the Rome Republican criticized Trump and gave one reason why she had decided to step down next month, a year before her term expires: safety.

Death threats

After she had broken with the president over several political issues — the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files chief among them — Trump had publicly called her a traitor. Then, both she and her son had experienced threats of violence, a pipe bomb against her home and death for her son.

The subject line of the threat against her son bore the same words Trump had uttered: “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” she said, telling interviewer Lesley Stahl that the threat therefore was  “directly fueled” by Trump.

Greene said that when she told Vice President J.D. Vance about it, he told her they would investigate. But when she told Trump, he responded with words she wouldn’t repeat, sharing only that the president “wasn’t very nice” and was “extremely unkind.”

Stahl and her crew visited Rome for the interview after Greene’s surprise announcement late last month that she would be leaving Congress Jan. 5, a year before her term expires. Greene said her decision was in part due to her vehement disagreement with Trump over the Epstein files.

She wanted them released. He did not.

‘Hurt people’

She said Trump had told her the release of the files would “hurt people … . I don’t know what that means,” she said. “I don’t know who they are.”

Greene said she had been deeply moved by watching Epstein’s victims tremble as they gave their first media interviews, and she said they deserved the full release of the files that they had been seeking.

Greene also broke with Trump over his decision to bomb Iran for Israel, for his support of the cryptocurrency industry and for his administration’s decision to allow vaccinations for Covid-19, which she deemed to be a nod to the pharmaceutical industry.

Greene, who was an ardent supporter of Trump, often wearing a red MAGA cap, said she is not MAGA anymore. That term belongs to Trump, she said. She is “America First.”

When Greene criticized the toxicity of contemporary politics, Stahl interjected, noting that Greene herself had contributed. Greene pushed back, saying Stahl was being accusatory.

Greene said that Republican members of Congress were terrified of crossing Trump and of being targeted by a “nasty Truth Social” post from him, but she said they ridiculed him behind his back, openly siding with him only after he won the Republican nomination last year.

Greene said her decision to leave politics was a transparent one, noting that few believe it, giving her a wink when she says she has “zero” interest in running for president or for the Senate and that she is not running for Georgia governor.

But she said it is true. She has no grand designs.

“Surprise, surprise,” Greene said, “I’m not your politician with a whole itinerary of plans or political ambitions.”

The post Marjorie Taylor Greene fires back at Trump, who called her a traitor appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

Distribution began this fall in parts of metro Atlanta and in southwest and central Georgia. The initiative is expected to be completed statewide by spring.

“The opioid settlement funds give us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to turn tragedy into prevention,” Kevin Tanner, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, said in a statement announcing the distribution Friday. “Putting overdose reversal kits in every Georgia school is a practical, compassionate use of those dollars. It means we are giving our educators and communities a fighting chance to stop a preventable death.”

The Georgia Department of Education is partnering with Tanner’s agency to distribute training resources to school staff. State School Superintendent Richard Woods said the partnership will ensure every school is ready for an emergency.

The initiative comes after Senate Bill 395 became law last year. Sen. Clint Dixon, R-Buford, co-sponsored “Wesley’s Law” in memory of a family member who died of a fentanyl overdose. The law requires schools to stock naloxone — a product branded as Narcan or Evzio — and allows teachers and other school staff to carry and administer the medication on school property.

The post All public schools to have naloxone by spring appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

Walmart announced the new service with partner Wing on Wednesday. In addition to metro Atlanta, the two will be rolling out drone deliveries in Charlotte, Houston, Orlando and Tampa.

They say they plan to reach a hundred stores in a year, after piloting the service at 18 locations in Dallas-Fort Worth.

“The popularity of drone delivery in DFW is a testament not just to its convenience, but to the way this technology quickly becomes a part of everyday life,” Wing CEO Adam Woodworth said in a statement.

The partnership is billing this as the first commercial drone delivery service in metro Atlanta. Yet illegal air deliveries are already commonplace to certain shady customers in Georgia. On Monday, state corrections officials lamented at a legislative hearing how drones had become a security threat, routinely penetrating the airspace over prisons to deliver contraband to inmates.

And driverless Waymo cars are already an everyday sight in Atlanta, where they have been delivering people to destinations since the summer.

But the new pilotless air shipping promises to give Christmas procrastinators who live within delivery range another chance to buy last-minute stocking stuffers, plus seasonal essentials such as wrapping paper and ingredients for holiday meals.

Wing says its 12-pound, white and yellow drones can range up to six miles at a cruising speed of 60 mph, delivering packages in five minutes. Besides quicker delivery, the company says communities stand to benefit when fewer packages move by road: less traffic would be a gift to everyone.

The six Georgia Walmart locations with drones will be in Conyers, Dallas, Hiram, Loganville, McDonough and Woodstock. (Check your address eligibility at wing.com/walmart).

The post Holiday deliveries coming to some homes by air, without the ‘ho ho ho’ appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Monday cancelled a preliminary injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia two years ago that stopped the state from enforcing its ban on giving “gifts” near polling places.

The three-judge appellate panel decided that a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in another case last year had changed the legal landscape for such decisions. The high court ruled in that case that lower courts had failed to fully analyze whether state content-moderation restrictions on social media companies violated the First Amendment.

The defendant in that case — Moody v. NetChoice, LLC — was an industry association for internet companies, but the same analysis applies in a case about regulating elections, the appeals court in Atlanta decided.

“The district court didn’t conduct the facial-challenge analysis now required by Moody,” the Eleventh Circuit Court opinion said. It said the district court had “failed to systematically assess the full sweep of the regulation and weigh the constitutional against the unconstitutional applications.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican running for governor, applauded the decision, issuing a statement that said it “reinforces a simple truth: Georgia has the right and the responsibility to shield voters from influence and interference at the polls.”

The GOP-controlled General Assembly passed the gifts ban in 2021, as part of an elections overhaul in the wake of claims by Donald Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.

Senate Bill 202 affected absentee voting and other election procedures, but one element in particular gained national attention: the ban on giving voters “any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” while in line at polling places.

Civil rights groups sued, calling the ban a barrier to voting. The U.S. Department of Justice under President Joe Biden sued, asserting the law violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by intentionally discriminating against Black voters.

Then, President Donald Trump started his second term and named Pam Bondi U.S. Attorney General. In March, she ordered the Justice Department to drop the lawsuit.

The appeals court order on Monday returns the case to the district court in Atlanta, where U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee has been overseeing the lawsuits and motions related to the 2021 law.

The post No handing out food and drink at polling places, court rules appeared first on Rough Draft Atlanta.