The Georgia prosecutor leading a criminal investigation into possible election interference by then-President Donald Trump and his allies wants to hear from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser.
In court filings Friday, Fulton County district Attorney Fani Willis said Gingrich and Flynn both have "unique knowledge" of the circumstances surrounding what she characterized as "multi-state, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”
Both Trump allies were requested to appear before a grand jury, with a proposed date of Nov. 16 for Gingrich and Nov. 22 for Flynn.
Willis said prosecutors want to ask Gingrich about his alleged involvement in a plan to have GOP electors meet and cast Electoral College votes in Georgia and other states that President Joe Biden won. Gingrich allegedly wrote an email to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone asking about the coordination of “contested electors" on December 14, 2020, Willis said, citing a House Jan. 6 committee letter last month to Gingrich calling on him to testify about emails he exchanged with former Trump senior advisers, including Jared Kushner and Jason Miller. The panel said that according to emails it had obtained, Gingrich gave his input about television ads that “repeated and relied upon false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.”
Willis is also seeking Gingrich's testimony regarding the ads, according to Friday's court filings.
In her petition seeking Flynn's testimony, Willis cited an interview he gave to Newsmax in December 2020 in which she said he proposed “that former President Trump ‘could order—within the swing states, if he wanted to—he could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically re-run an election in each of those states.’”
Prosecutors also want to question Flynn about a December 2020 meeting he had at the White House with Trump, attorney Sidney Powell and others associated with the Trump campaign that, according to the filing, involved discussions about appointing Powell as special counsel to investigate the 2020 election, invoking martial law and seizing voting machines.
Flynn was subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee to testify about the same Oval Office meeting. He exercised his Fifth Amendment right by declining to answer the committee’s questions during a closed-door meeting in March.
NBC News has reached out to representatives of Flynn and Gingrich for comment.
The new requests for testimony come after the probe widened in August to include members of Trump's inner circle from his final weeks in office, such as Meadows and Powell. In mid-August, Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was identified as a “target” of the probe, spent six hours at the Fulton County courthouse for testimony.
Prosecutors on Friday said they are also seeking testimony from Trump White House Eric Herschmann, has also testified before the Jan. 6 committee, regarding conversations he had with the former president and his inner circle about their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Willis also requested depositions from Jim Penrose, a former National Security Agency official who was working for Powell when a local elections office in Coffee County, Ga., was allegedly breached, and Stephen Cliffgard Lee, a chaplain from Illinois who coordinated with a Trump campaign director to approach Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman at her home.