Before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought together a grand jury to indict Donald Trump and 18 other co-conspirators, she empaneled a special grand jury that also wanted to pursue criminal charges against Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, military-general-turned-far-right-conspiracy-theorist Mike Flynn, and three senators—two former and one current.
Among the senators were Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and the two Georgia senators who were in office at the time but who both lost re-election: David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
None were ultimately indicted when Willis officially filed charges against Trump and his 18 cohorts last month. But the release of the special grand jury report sheds new light into the overall investigation that Fulton County has been engaged in for more than two years.
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After much prodding by journalists, a state judge on Friday finally released the full version of the report put together by a so-called “special purpose grand jury” that essentially conducted a pre-investigation of Trump’s election interference attempts in Georgia during the 2020 election.
The DA put together that panel to advise her on whether or not to seek indictments against Trump and others, and she later empaneled a regular grand jury that followed through on many of those recommendations.
The report, which was previously released in a highly redacted form, offers more insight into the strength of the DA’s case.
It does not, however, explain why the DA chose not to include them in last month’s indictment.
But there are clues. Not every juror on this special panel saw fit to indict current and former senators. While 13 of them wanted to indict Graham for taking part in the attempted coup, seven did not, and one person abstained. Similarly, the vote was 17-4 for Purdue and 14-6-1 for Loeffler.
There remains the possibility that some of them may have begun cooperating with prosecutors against their associates, evident by the way the DA also chose to not indict others on the list.
For example, this panel recommended that the DA also indict the many fake electors that Republicans tried to use to subvert the 2020 election results in that state. Yet, Willis would later pressure several of them to flip and become witnesses against co-conspirators in the weeks before the indictment, according to court documents filed by her office.
Friday’s report shows that the nearly two dozen Atlanta-area residents who served on the panel for 10 months wanted to levy serious criminal charges against high-ranking politicians and political operatives.
They concluded there was enough evidence to include three current and former senators (Graham, Loeffler, and Purdue), as well as Epshteyn, Flynn, and Mitchell as members of what prosecutors deemed a “criminal enterprise” that tried to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results in five states and Washington, D.C.
They also saw evidence that apparently convinced them Mitchell should face additional criminal charges for intimidating a witness. She was one of several top Trump associates who was on the infamous phone call in which the president, while at the White House, pressured Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes” that didn't exist to flip the election in his favor.
