Atlanta Journal Constitution columnist Bill Torpy says the U.S District Court who smacked down President Donald Trump’s attempt to “assuage his maniacal ego and excuse the embarrassing ‘L’” on his record, is a conservative farm boy at heart.
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“The judge knows politics, as well as taking a tough stand. Billy Ray grew up on a Middle Georgia farm and his family was in the political game: One uncle was a state rep, another was a congressman. Ray once headed Gwinnett’s GOP,” said Torpy, a veteran Georgia reporter. “ … Now, Ray is no radical, left-wing whacko, or whatever Trump calls those who rule against him. He’s a former tough-on-crime GOP state senator nominated to the bench by Trump in 2017.”
“That was when Trump still picked normal, reasonable Republicans,” Torpy added.
That’s probably why Judge William M. Ray II – or “Billy Ray — blocked a grand jury subpoena for information about 2020 election workers in Georgia, delivering a hard rebuff to the Justice Department’s investigation into how the election was handled in the Atlanta-area.
Torpy called the whole endeavor an “overtime-sucking boondoggle” by DOJ “sychophants … to find something, anything, that President Donald Trump can use to continue spouting his lie that he unfairly lost the 2020 election.”
Worse, if he’d been successful, Trump could have fomented enough question about election integrity in Georgia’s biggest and bluest territory election denier lawmakers could declare future election results uncertain due to questions of fraud or irregularities — or for any other justification, frankly — and the House or Senate could simply decide who to seat, according to veteran Atlanta election attorney David Walbert.
“And there is no doubt who today’s House and Senate would seat if there is any dispute,” Walbert told Torpy.
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But thankfully Ray called the DOJ request to pore through piles of Fulton County election records an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”
In his ruling, Torpy said Judge Ray “sprinkled in a little civics lesson — with a warning.”
“Everyone, whether you support the president or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the grand jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose,” wrote Ray.
Ray, added Torpy, once “walked out on a limb in 2001” and was one of only six Senate Republicans who voted to remove the Confederate symbol from Georgia’s state flag.
“That move helped cost Gov. Roy Barnes his job. But Ray never found out if it would have deep-sixed him. He was appointed as a Gwinnett County judge before he had to run again,” said Torpy. I figure he was once a pol, came from a political family and can smell political dung a barnyard away.”
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“Hopefully, there are more out there like him,” Torpy added.
