Ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, involved in efforts to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, has been ordered by a South Carolina judge to testify in a criminal investigation into election meddling. 

The ruling was made on Wednesday.

Mr Meadows, 63, has been battling to avoid testifying before a special grand jury looking into the allegations of Mr Trump and his friends meddling in the Georgia election. 

Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, is in charge of the investigation. 

James Bannister, Mr Meadows’s attorney, said he would appeal the ruling, according to a later statement from the lawyer’s spokeswoman, while he awaited the judge’s final written ruling.

Mr Meadows had a crucial role in contesting the election results, according to information revealed by congressional hearings into the attack on the Capitol on January 6. 

The hearings uncovered, among other things, that Mr Meadows repeatedly requested the Department of Justice to conduct investigations based on Mr Trump’s unfounded theories about election irregularities across the nation, amongst other allegations levelled against him like trying to reverse the election defeat of Mr Trump in the last election in Georgia. 

In his argument on Wednesday in South Carolina, Mr Bannister, the attorney for Mr Meadows, said Mr Meadows should be protected from testifying by executive privilege. The executive privilege is rooted in the separation of powers doctrine that permits executive branch officials to withhold information, in some circumstances, from the legislative branch or the courts. 

Mr Meadows had filed a federal lawsuit to challenge a subpoena from the January 6 committee. The attorney contended that the Georgia subpoena issue should wait until the federal courts had decided on the lawsuit.