A new report released on Friday revealed that the special grand jury convened to investigate efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia recommended indictments against 39 people including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
Summary
A new report released on Friday revealed that the special grand jury convened to investigate efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia recommended indictments against 39 people including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
- The special grand jury recommended charges against other top Republicans besides Graham, including former Georgia US Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in 2017.
- It’s unclear what actions, if any, that Graham, Perdue, and Loeffler would’ve committed to earn this recommendation, as the Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause which allows members of Congress fairly wide latitude to speak on public issues without fear of criminal prosecution.
- Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis ultimately brought charges against 19 people: former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants including ex-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell.
- Georgia special grand juries are relatively rare and serve as an investigative tool for prosecutors. They may not bring indictments but can be used to produce a report with non-binding recommendations for indictments for prosecutors, who must convene a separate grand jury in order to bring charges.
- The recommendations were made based on testimony from witnesses brought in by prosecutors and evidence presented by prosecutors. The report makes it clear that the panel “contained no election law experts or criminal lawyers.”
- CNN covered Graham’s response to the report. “This is troubling for the country. We can’t criminalize senators doing their job when they have a constitutional requirement to fulfill,” Graham told reporters. “It would be irresponsible for me — in my opinion — as chairman of the committee, not to try to find out what happened. It’d be irresponsible for me to tell the voters of South Carolina what I did without actually trying to find out what the right answer was.”
- The New York Times observed “the report provides a window on the office’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion, with prosecutors seemingly concluding that some of the people named in the report had committed acts that would be too difficult to prove were criminal.”
- The Washington Post noted “the report, which is not legally binding, does not include the evidence or reasoning behind the jury’s thinking — though testimony transcripts and evidence are likely to emerge as part of the criminal proceedings against those who were ultimately charged in the case.”
- “Democrat Partisan Fani Willis and her unlawfully constructed, politically motivated, so-called ‘Special Grand Jury’ have now been completely exposed as operatives and tools of the radical Democrats that they are,” a Trump campaign spokesman told Fox News Digital. “In a clearly biased, un-American act, a majority of the ‘Special Grand Jurors’ voted to indict dozens of innocent individuals, including former and sitting United States Senators, simply for raising concerns about election integrity and exercising their First Amendment Rights under the Constitution.”
- National Review noted Graham testified about his phone calls with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the aftermath of the 2020 election last November after the Supreme Court ordered him to testify. Raffensperger said Graham was trying to pressure him to discount legal ballots, while Graham said they were merely “investigatory phone calls.”
- The Wall Street Journal observed “The 21 people who weren’t indicted include mostly former Trump team lawyers and the so-called fake electors who gathered at the Georgia State Capitol in December 2020. One person eventually charged, Trump adviser Mike Roman, wasn’t mentioned in the special grand-jury report.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
