The Atlanta-area district attorney conducting a criminal investigation of Republican efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia argued in a court filing Friday that Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, should appear before a special grand jury next week despite his appeal to postpone offering testimony.

In the filing, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which is leading the probe into the actions of former President Donald Trump and his allies, argued that delaying Graham’s appearance would also “delay the revelation of an entire category of relevant witnesses,” pushing back the time line of the investigation.

Graham has formally appealed a judge’s order requiring him to testify on Tuesday. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, has expressed interest in questioning Graham about conversations he had in the wake of the 2020 election with Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, among other things.

Graham’s lawyers have characterized Willis’s investigation as a fishing expedition and said his outreach to Raffensperger was consistent with his duties as a senator.

The US district judge who issued the order, Leigh Martin May, denied Graham’s request for a stay Friday as well as his request for an emergency hearing.

“Senator Graham’s arguments are entirely unpersuasive, and they do not even demonstrate a ‘substantial case on the merits,’” the judge wrote.

The question of whether Graham testifies is up to the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, after the senator filed an appeal Wednesday.

In the filing, Willis’s office seeks to turn Graham’s argument as to why he is entitled to a delay on its head.

“Senator Graham insists that he seeks to delay his appearance before the Special Purpose Grand Jury not just for his own sake, but also for the sake of the separation of powers, federalism, and ‘for the People,’” the filing said. “The Special Purpose Grand Jury, however, is the People: a collection of citizens called together to perform their civic duty on behalf of their neighbors and families. ... The District Attorney asks that this Court deny Senator Graham’s motion in order that, for a single day, can assist them in that great task without further delay.”

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has ordered the release of a secret Justice Department memo discussing whether President Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.

Department officials argued that the document was protected because it concerned internal deliberations over whether to charge Trump with obstructing special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia. But the judges agreed with Jackson that the record clearly showed that Mueller had already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime.

Instead, the panel ruled, the March 2019 memorandum concerned what then-attorney general William Barr would say to Congress in advance of the Mueller report’s release about the evidence of obstruction.

“A charging decision concededly was off the table and the agency failed to invoke an alternative rationale that might well have justified its invocation of the privilege,” the judges wrote.

The court said that if the government had accurately described to Jackson the motivations behind the memo, the ruling might be different. But “any notion that the memorandum concerned whether to say something to the public went entirely unargued — and even unmentioned” until the appeal.

Barr ultimately told lawmakers that since Mueller had declined to reach a conclusion, he and his deputy made their own determination that the evidence was lacking. When the full report was released weeks later, it said there was “substantial evidence” that Trump obstructed justice.

In Pennsylvania’s contentious Senate race, Democratic nominee Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is hitting his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, where he lives.

Fetterman took aim Wednesday at the number of houses Oz owns, using the celebrity doctor and TV personality’s 10-property portfolio to paint him as a wealthy carpetbagger who is out of touch with average Pennsylvanians.

“I’ve never spoken to a PA resident who doesn’t know how many houses they have. . . let alone be off by 8,” Fetterman quipped on Twitter after a Tuesday report by the Daily Beast that Oz owns 10 properties — far more than the two “legitimate” houses he claimed in an exchange with a Democratic operative during a recent public event.

Oz defended himself by saying he purchased his houses with his own money — a swipe at Fetterman, who relied on significant financial assistance from his family until becoming lieutenant governor in 2019.

“You lived off your parents until you were almost 50. Regular people don’t mooch off their parents when they’re 50. Get off the couch John!” Oz tweeted. He replied to Fetterman in a follow-up tweet that he had “10 properties” but “2 homes,” which he said he disclosed when he announced his candidacy.

The social media mudslinging has been a hallmark of the race since the candidates emerged from the May primary, though Fetterman’s camp has shown far more fluency with pop culture and social media (after the Twitter row, the Fetterman campaign trolled Oz with a game-show parody of “Family Feud” titled “How Many Houses Do You Own?”)

Recent polls show Fetterman holding a double-digit lead over Oz, a celebrity television doctor. Oz’s campaign has spent much of the last week not only fending off attacks about how many houses he owns but withstanding online ridicule over a recently resurfaced video in which Oz botches the name of a local grocery store chain while supposedly buying ingredients for “crudités.”

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is warning that the GOP may not win back control of the Senate in November’s midterm elections — a cycle that typically would be favorable to the party not in power — as a political action committee linked to McConnell stages a rescue effort in the Ohio Senate race.

Asked Wednesday by reporters in Kentucky about his midterm predictions, McConnell said there’s “probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate.”

“Senate races are just different, they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” he said, according to NBC News.

In a year when Republicans should have the advantage over Democrats, especially as President Biden’s approval ratings sag and inflation remains high, the GOP is facing surprisingly tight Senate races in several states — even with Republican groups providing huge sums of money to aid struggling candidates.

On Wednesday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the Senate Leadership Fund, a political action committee associated with McConnell, is investing $28 million in radio and television ads in Ohio in support of Republican Senate candidate J. D. Vance, who has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump.

The new pro-Vance ads will start rolling out after Labor Day, according to the newspaper, which noted the ad buy marks a significant increase from the estimated $5 million that national Republicans have invested in the Ohio race so far. In 2020, Trump won Ohio by about 8 percentage points.

Still, polls have shown a remarkably close race between Vance, a venture capitalist and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” and his Democratic opponent, Representative Tim Ryan, as they vie for retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman’s seat. Vance’s primary race was in part financed by billionaire Peter Thiel, who previously employed Vance at his venture capital firm. But Vance was outraised 4 to 1 by Ryan in the second quarter of 2022.

Ryan, a 10-term congressman who ran for president in 2020, is an experienced campaigner and moderate Democrat willing to break with party leadership on some policies, most notably trade and China.

Republicans need to gain one seat to capture the majority in a 50-50 Senate in which Vice President Harris is the tiebreaking vote. The significant investment in a GOP-leaning state for a Republican-held seat is surprising for the party 82 days to Election Day.

So far, the Senate Leadership Fund has also spent large amounts of money in the Georgia and Pennsylvania Senate races, investing $37 million and $34.1 million, respectively. But those races are considered more competitive for Republicans.

In Georgia, Republicans are seeking to unseat Democratic Senator Raphael G. Warnock, whose victory in January 2021 helped Democrats achieve their narrow majority in the Senate. However, GOP candidate Herschel Walker — who has come under scrutiny for past falsehoods and the revelation of several children who had not previously been publicly disclosed — trails Warnock in the polls.

Work at Boston Globe Media