ATLANTA — Ever since the 2020 election President Donald Trump has been focused on Georgia for several reasons and in various ways.
The state even played a key role in the former president's second impeachment as the only state mentioned in the article of impeachment against him.
Georgia now could play a key role in the Jan. 6 committee hearings.
"It certainly seems to be the eye of the hurricane here and it continues to be," Georgia State University law professor Clark Cunningham said.
Thursday 11Alive confirmed with a source in the Georgia Secretary of State's Office, that Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger and his office's Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling have received subpoenas to testify before the Jan. 6 House committee.
The pair is expected to testify the week of June 20 and are the only members of the Secretary of State's Office to be subpoenaed by the committee, according to the source that talked with 11Alive.
Raffensperger and Sterling could provide testimony on a variety of topics.
"It has to stop!" Sterling passionately said in a news conference nearly a month after the 2020 presidential election.
He was addressing death threats himself, Raffensperger and county-level election workers had received following the election, along with other comments of election claims not supported by evidence.
During his comments, Sterling asked for the attacks to end and pushed Trump to call for his supporters to back off.
"There is no evidence that then-President Trump did anything to discourage his followers from this action, so I think we may hear testimony about those threats in pretty compelling and horrifying detail," Cunnigham said.
Raffensperger was also on the receiving end of a phone call days before Jan. 6, 2021, where Trump could be heard asking him to "find votes" and asked for the exact number of votes to tip the election in the then-president's favor.
Cunningham said Trump's campaign stop in Georgia on the eve of the U.S. Senate runoffs and days before the riot at the U.S. Capitol Building could also be highlighted during the hearings.
"He went out of his way to indicate he was expecting Pence to act in a way that would allow him to continue to be president, so that is an important event in Georgia as well," Cunningham said of Trump's speech on Jan. 4, 2021.
Georgia could also be brought up during the hearings through evidence that was just ordered to be turned over to the committee.
A federal judge ordered Trump's attorney John Eastman to provide a batch of 159 documents to the committee, with court filings showing Georgia is named in some of the emails contained in the documents.
"A number of those documents involve communications to and from members of the Georgia General Assembly, including some Georgia lawmakers who were apparently asking Trump's lawyer to also be their lawyer and I think all of us in Georgia will be interested to know more about that," Cunningham said.