On Tuesday, a federal judge in Georgia quashed a grand jury subpoena aimed at validating President Donald Trump's counterfactual claim that massive fraud deprived him of his rightful victory in the 2020 election. U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump appointee, emphasized the "staggering" breadth of the subpoena, which sought "private and sensitive" information about thousands of Fulton County employees and volunteers who were involved in collecting, processing, counting, or recounting ballots that year. That demand, he ruled, could not be justified by "any valid prosecutorial need," since the statutory deadline for criminal charges related to the 2020 election came and went at least six months ago.
Ray's decision is striking for several reasons. First, it was necessary only because Trump remains fully invested in a stolen-election fantasy that the courts rejected nearly six years ago. Second, although the Department of Justice (DOJ) seems eager to pursue the president's personal vendettas, it frequently falls down on the job, as illustrated by its disregard for the statute of limitations in this case. Third, federal judges almost never quash grand jury subpoenas, so this rebuke by a Trump nominee speaks volumes about the incompetence of the president's hatchet men.
