A special purpose grand jury has recommended an Atlanta-area prosecutor seek indictments as part of her investigation into former President Donald Trump’s attempts to surreptitiously fake Georgia ballot results to steal the 2020 election.
The highly redacted report doesn’t say whether Trump himself should be indicted, but jurors do want their local prosecutor to punish witnesses who lied about what happened.
“A majority of the grand jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it. The grand jury recommends that the District Attorney seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling,” says the report, which was only partially released on Thursday morning.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis convened this unique grand jury last year as a preliminary step in exploring how Trump and his Republican associates sought to undermine the state’s election. The group did not have the authority to indict anyone, but it was tasked with producing a report outlining a path forward for prosecutors.
The DA may choose to put together a more traditional grand jury, which will have the power to potentially indict the former American president, his advisers who lied to Georgia legislators, and MAGA loyalists who banded together to become fake electors in a scheme to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s victory.
And Willis has indicated she’s heading in that direction. When discussing the release of the report last month, Willis told the judge overseeing this matter that “decisions are imminent.”
Trump potentially faces criminal charges over his infamous Jan. 2, 2021 phone call to top Georgia elections official Brad Raffensperger, where the president pressured him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the 2020 election—something that official later described as a “threat” from a “bully” that “was nothing but an attempt at manipulation.”
The few portions of the report released Thursday show that the special purpose grand jury made the incremental step of stripping Trump and his cohorts of any notion they were standing on solid ground when they called into question 2020 election results.
“We find by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election,” they wrote. “The grand jury heard extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud from poll workers, investigators, technical experts, and State of Georgia employees and officials, as well as from persons still claiming that such fraud took place.”
Notably, the jurors on this special panel also recommended that Willis pursue the larger investigation—and hinted at election-related criminal charges.
“This grand jury contained no election law experts or criminal lawyers,” they wrote. “If this report fails to include any potential violations of referenced statutes that were shown in the investigation, we acknowledge the discretion of the District Attorney to seek indictments where she finds sufficient cause.”
But the jurors did specifically ask that Willis target the witnesses who lied under oath.
The alleged liar—or liars—are anyone’s guess. Several key figures who were in Trump’s orbit during his desperate attempts to cling to power in 2020 have reportedly testified before this special purpose grand jury. According to the city’s local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, witnesses include:
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who received Trump’s intimidating phone call to fake votes,
- Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who also called Raffensperger with a highly suspicious request to have him consider tossing out absentee ballots,
- Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who testified at several hearings before state legislators in 2020 and fed them conspiracy theories and fake evidence of election fraud that were quickly debunked,
- Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Trump pressured to call for a special state legislative session that would take steps to undermine election results there,
- Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, whose role as state senate president might have made him privy to the election fraud effort,
- State Attorney General Chris Carr, who spoke to Trump about the way he opposed a Texas lawsuit Trump was trying to use to toss out Georgia’s election results,
- Former Georgia Speaker of the House David Ralston, who refused to call for that special legislative session (and died this past November), and
- Michael Flynn, the disgraced Army general and Trump coup plotter who has become a QAnon conspiracy devotee.
The juiciest details are still hidden from the public, however. Only the report’s introduction, conclusion, and a so-called “Section VIII” were released—and even those included some redactions.
Last month, Willis asked Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. I. McBurney to keep the report secret. She argued that opening it could violate the rights of people who haven’t yet been criminally charged. She also warned that going public with too much information could harm her ability to successfully prosecute them. Willis is particularly sensitive about the need for prosecutors to stay quiet about pending cases. Notably, Willis started her tenure in 2021 by recusing herself from overseeing the case of a white Atlanta police officer who killed a Black man, Rayshard Brooks—a shooting that her predecessor used in political ads for his failed reelection campaign.
Discussing the special purpose grand jury’s report in court last month, she told the judge, “We think for future defendants to be treated fairly, it is not appropriate at this time to have this report released.”
Still, on Monday, Judge McBurney ordered some portions of the report to be released, noting that “while publication might not be convenient for the pacing of the District Attorney’s investigation, the compelling public interest in these proceedings and the unquestionable value and importance of transparency require their release.”
This special purpose grand jury was convened in May 2022, started hearing evidence in June, and issued its final report on Dec. 15. Legal scholars familiar with Fulton County’s court procedures, which call for two month-long grand jury stints, said the DA could have started seeking indictments as early as January—in which case indictments could be ready as early as the end of February. Alternatively, if she starts in March, they could be ready by late April.
