Georgia Panel Recommended Charging Dozens, Including Lindsey Graham, in Trump Case - The New York Times

A special grand jury made the recommendation last year after hearing from dozens of witnesses on whether Donald J. Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election.

A special grand jury that investigated election interference allegations in Georgia last year recommended indicting more than twice as many Trump allies as prosecutors eventually sought to charge, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.

In its final report, which a judge unsealed on Friday, the panel also recommended charges against Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s main lawyers, as well as a number of other Trump-aligned lawyers, including Cleta Mitchell and L. Lin Wood.

Mr. Trump and 18 allies were charged in a racketeering indictment that was handed up last month by a regular grand jury in Fulton County, Ga. But the special grand jury, whose role was advisory, recommended bringing charges against an even wider web of Trump allies who tried to change the election results.

Officials with the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on Friday. But 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 special grand jury, which Fulton County prosecutors convened to help with the investigation, met at an Atlanta courthouse from June to December of last year. It spent much of that time hearing testimony from 75 witnesses on the question of whether Mr. Trump or any of his allies had sought to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

Under Georgia law, the panel could not issue indictments itself. In the Trump case, that task fell to a regular grand jury that was seated over the summer. The regular grand jury heard evidence from prosecutors for one day in early August before voting to indict all 19 defendants whom prosecutors had sought to charge.

The special grand jury’s mandate was to write a report with recommendations on whether indictments were warranted in the investigation, which was led by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Ms. Willis asked to convene a special grand jury because such panels have subpoena powers, and she was concerned that some witnesses would not cooperate without being subpoenaed.

Portions of the report, which was written last December, were publicly released in February. But those excerpts did not indicate who had been recommended for indictment, or on what charges. The release of the full nine-page report this week was ordered by Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who had been waiting to do so until charges were filed.

Read the Report by the Special Grand Jury in Georgia That Investigated President Trump

The special grand jury investigated whether Mr. Trump interfered in the 2020 election in the state. Their report included recommendations on whether indictments were warranted, and for whom.

Read Document

Mr. Epshteyn declined on Friday to comment about the report. Mr. Flynn’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall, said in a statement that the report revealed “corruption by a politically motivated prosecutor,” though he provided no evidence. Others whom the advisory panel recommended for indictment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

After the special grand jury recommended indictments of 39 people, the district attorney had to weigh which prosecutions would be the most likely to succeed in court. A potential case against Mr. Graham, for example, would have been hampered by the fact that there were conflicting accounts of telephone calls he made to a top Georgia official.

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Graham said, “It should never be a crime for a federal elected official, particularly the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who will have to vote to certify a presidential election, to question and ensure the integrity of that election.”

While the report provided little explanation of what drove the panel’s recommendations, it held some interesting revelations. The special grand jury voted 13-7, with one abstention, to recommend an indictment of Mr. Graham, a far narrower vote than most of the others that the jurors took.

In many of the panel’s votes on whether to recommend indictment — particularly those regarding Mr. Trump — a single juror voted no, highlighting the challenges that Ms. Willis may face in convincing an entire trial jury in a criminal case involving the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner. Unlike the special grand jury, a trial jury will hear not just from the prosecutor but also from the defense.

A number of the people named in the special grand jury’s report probably avoided being charged by cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office. More than half of those who cast bogus Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump in Georgia are known to be cooperating.

The people named in the report are a who’s who of Trump allies. Among them is Cleta Mitchell, who played a leading role in the Trump campaign’s efforts to reverse the election results in Georgia. Ms. Mitchell took part in Mr. Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, during which Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Raffensperger to help him “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome of the election in Georgia.

Jurors recommended a number of charges against Ms. Mitchell, and voted unanimously on four charges related to the Raffensperger call.

The two former Republican senators from Georgia, Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue, were both outspoken allies of Mr. Trump who were defeated by Democratic rivals in runoff elections that took place in January 2021. In November 2020, as the razor-close presidential vote count continued, they issued a joint statement calling for Mr. Raffensperger to step down, accusing him of “mismanagement and lack of transparency.”

The special grand jury report recommended charging Mr. Perdue in connection with “the persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees" in the weeks after the election, listing a law prohibiting “false statements and writings” as a relevant statute.

Both former senators are listed in the report as having been involved in “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

Ms. Loeffler, like several others named in the report, responded by criticizing the prosecution as politically motivated.

Also listed as playing a role in the national effort are Burt Jones, the current lieutenant governor of Georgia, and Mr. Wood, a lawyer who propagated baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud.

In a brief phone conversation on Friday, Mr. Wood said that he had filed election-related lawsuits in Georgia, but noted that his name did not appear in the indictment.

“I didn’t commit any crime,” he said.

Mr. Jones, a former state senator, served as one of the bogus pro-Trump electors. Last summer, when Mr. Jones was running for lieutenant governor, Judge McBurney barred Ms. Willis’s office from pursuing a case against him because she had been featured at a fund-raiser for his Democratic rival in the race. An investigation of Mr. Jones will be handled by a different prosecutor.

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Jones called the investigation and prosecution a “political circus.”

Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Flynn were recommended for indictment “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election” in several swing states, though the report offered little further detail. Mr. Epshteyn played a central role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power after his election loss. Mr. Flynn, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators, has embraced and advanced conspiracy theories about the election.

Mr. Graham’s own calls to Mr. Raffensperger in the days after the election were one of the earliest signs of the pressure that would be focused on Georgia’s then little-known secretary of state. Fulton County prosecutors indicated in court filings last year that they were interested in the calls made by Mr. Graham, a onetime critic of Mr. Trump who became a staunch supporter.

Mr. Raffensperger has said that in the calls, Mr. Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures, a step that would have excluded many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. But the phone calls are not known to have been recorded, and recollections differ about exactly what was said — factors that probably figured in the decision not to charge Mr. Graham.

In a filing seeking Mr. Graham’s testimony, prosecutors said that he “questioned Secretary Raffensperger and his staff about re-examining certain absentee ballots cast in Georgia in order to explore the possibility of a more favorable outcome for former President Donald Trump,” and “made reference to allegations of widespread voter fraud” during those calls.

A few weeks after the calls, Mr. Trump followed up with a call of his own to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, saying that he wanted to “find” roughly 12,000 votes, enough to reverse his loss in Georgia. Mr. Trump’s call, which was recorded, is the basis for a number of charges in the 98-page indictment.

Mr. Graham has characterized as “ridiculous” the idea that he had suggested to Mr. Raffensperger that he throw out legally cast votes, and the senator’s lawyers have argued that he was carrying out a legitimate investigative function as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In an unsuccessful bid to avoid testifying before the special grand jury last year, Mr. Graham waged a legal battle that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the Georgia indictment, Mr. Graham told reporters in South Carolina that he was not cooperating with the Fulton County prosecutors, dismissing the idea as “crazy stuff.”

As for Mr. Trump and the allies of his who were charged in the case last month, it is still not clear when and in what court they will face trial.

On Friday, a judge rejected an effort by Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, to move his case to federal court. The defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro have sought and been granted early starting dates for speedy trials in state court.

Judges working in courthouses a few blocks apart in downtown Atlanta are sorting through the flurry of competing motions.

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

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