A special purpose grand jury in Georgia that investigated Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election for nearly two years recommended bringing criminal charges against several people who ultimately were not charged, including the US senator Lindsey Graham, former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as the influential conservative figure Cleta Mitchell.
The special purpose grand jury also recommended indicting Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, Lin Wood, a lawyer who spread some of the most fantastical claims about election fraud after the 2020 race, and Boris Epshteyn, who remains a top Trump aide.
Those recommendations were revealed on Friday when the special purpose grand jury’s final report was unsealed. A regular grand jury last month indicted Trump and 18 others over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those charged include Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell and the former Georgia Republican party chairman David Shafer. The special purpose grand jury recommended bringing charges against 39 people.
The special purpose grand jury was selected in May last year in order to assist Willis in her investigation. The panel issued its final report on 15 December 2022. Unlike a regular grand jury, a special purpose grand jury can issue subpoenas, but not indictments. A regular grand jury issued indictments against Trump last month.
Willis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Trump used the release of the report to continue to attack Willis. “Essentially, they wanted to indict anybody who happened to be breathing at the time,” he said in a post on his Truth Social network.
The special purpose grand jury recommended bringing charges against Graham, Perdue and Loeffler “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election with efforts focused on Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia”.
Graham, a key Trump ally in the Senate, called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, after the election and inquired about tossing aside legally cast mail-in ballots. He has denied wrongdoing and disputed Raffensperger’s recollection of the phone call. After unsuccessfully fighting the special purpose grand jury’s efforts to have him testify, Graham testified before the panel last year.
“What I did was consistent with my job as being a US senator, chair of the judiciary committee,” Graham told reporters at the Capitol on Friday, according to HuffPost. “I think the system in this country is getting off the rails and we have to be careful not to use the legal system as a political tool.”
Perdue reportedly pushed the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, to call a special session of the Georgia legislature in order to overturn the election results. Loeffler initially said she would vote against certification of Biden’s win in the US Senate before reversing course after the January 6 riot and voting in favor of certification.
Mitchell, who remains an influential figure on the right today, was on the infamous January 2021 phone call in which Trump asked Raffensperger to find votes in his favor. The special purpose grand jury unanimously recommended indicting her under several Georgia statutes, including those that outlaw interfering with performance of election duties, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, false statements and using pressure to influence an official proceeding.
The Conservative Partnership Institute, where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
J Tom Morgan, the former district attorney in DeKalb county, which neighbors Fulton county, said that in nearly 40 years of practicing law, he had never seen a grand jury report publicly released that recommended charges without an accompanying indictment.
“It kind of puts the DA in a bind that she now has to justify why these people were not indicted. Could there be special plea deals or negotiations between some of these people that she’s not ready to reveal?” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, it’s her decision and her decision alone whether to go forward with any or all of those recommendations.”
He added that he believes the names of those who were not ultimately indicted should have been redacted.
“I’m not commenting on whether or not these people should be indicted. That’s for the DA to decide. But what you’ve got is a report naming all these people who should be indicted and now they’re not indicted and they have no way to defend themselves,” he added. “You’ve got a grand jury saying, ‘Hey these people committed crimes. But since they’re not indicted, they don’t have a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law.”
Indicting US senators could have raised constitutional questions, said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
“Some of the legislators have constitutional immunity issues where they can’t be tried for actions they took in their capacity as lawmakers. So, jurors might understandably think something they did was fishy but it doesn’t rise to anything prosecutable,” he wrote in an email.
“A second issue might be immunity deals or other cooperation negotiations that may have foreclosed an indictment,” he added. “And a third is practical: is there insufficient evidence or would indicting a 20th or 21st co-conspirator unnecessarily burden an efficient prosecution for little benefit in the interest of justice? Prosecutors always must use their discretion because resources and political capital are finite.”
It also recommended charges against Burt Jones, who served as a fake elector and is now lieutenant governor of Georgia. A special prosecutor is handling an investigation of Jones after Willis was barred from investigating him after hosting a fundraiser for a political rival.
Emily Kohrs, a 30-year-old who served as the foreperson of the grand jury, signaled that the panel had recommended a long list of people to be charged earlier this year.
“It’s not a short list,” she told CNN in February, months before Trump was indicted. “I will say that when this list comes out, you wouldn’t – there are no major plot twists waiting for you.”
