The final report of the special purpose grand jury, whose recommendations led to the indictment of former president Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants, has blown a massive hole in Trump’s persecution narrative, which has been widely adopted throughout the GOP, while also reiterating that there was no widespread voter fraud.
The report shows that, rather than indicting everyone the special purpose grand jury recommended, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been restrained and professional. She ended up indicting less than half of the 39 individuals recommended for indictment, a decision that’s perfectly in line with her repeated statements that politics would play no role in the process, and she would proceed just as she would in any other criminal case.
Most notably, the special grand jury recommended charging three U.S. senators for their involvement in the national effort to overturn the election: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and since defeated Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, but Willis declined to indict them — probably because the 13-7 vote of the grand jurors, in Graham’s case, indicated difficulty in securing a conviction, which would require a unanimous verdict finding of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
“At the end of the day, nothing happened,” Graham falsely claimed. “What I did was consistent with my job as a United States senator, chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”
But, clearly an overwhelming majority of grand jurors disagreed, apparently believing Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has said that in phone calls Graham suggested the rejection of all mail-in votes from Georgia counties with high rates of questionable signatures — an arbitrary, unlawful action that would have thrown out many more Democratic votes than Republican ones. However, those phone calls were not recorded, so securing a unanimous verdict could be very difficult, and prosecutors are expected to only bring charges they believe they can prove to a jury’s satisfaction.
Declining to indict in such a situation is not evidence that “nothing happened,” as Graham claimed. Raffensperger has already provided evidence that something did. Rather, it is evidence that Willis is acting like a responsible professional prosecutor, only charging cases she is highly confident she will win.
But Willis’ decision regarding Sen. Perdue seems to show something more. The grand jury vote on Sen. Perdue was significantly stronger — 17-4 on the same count, and 16-1 on a separate count based on “persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees.” The apparent strength of this other charge suggests that Willis very likely may believe she could convict him at trial. But there’s clearly some risk this could backfire, as charging a former GOP senator could feed the appearance of a political prosecution, which in turn might result in other convictions being put at risk. While Willis has pledged not to make decisions based on politics, this decision would come close to doing that: it’s not based on politics, but rather on prosecutorial judgment about how politics could interfere with convicting the guilty, even if it means letting one of them go.
We can’t be sure this is what Willis is thinking. But it’s certainly consistent with her decision not to charge Perdue. What’s not consistent with her decision is the GOP claim that she’s out to get every Republican she can — a claim that was widely echoed in GOP circles, after Trump himself repeated in a social media post.
“ZERO credibility and badly taints Fani Willis and this whole Political Witch Hunt,” Trump wrote. “Essentially, they wanted to indict anybody who happened to be breathing at the time.”
But that’s the exact opposite of what the report shows, because Trump is confusing things on two levels. First, he’s confusing the special grand jury — a group of citizens — with District Attorney Fani Willis. And second, he’s confusing the recommendation to indict 39 people with Willis’ decision to only charge 19.
Contrary to Trump, and his GOP echo-chamber, the report shows how massive the effort to overturn the 2020 election was, with more than twice as many potential defendants than were ultimately charged. At the same time, the special grand jury found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”
The number of defendants was surely cut for a variety of reasons — almost certainly including some who’ve signed cooperation agreements. But they were not cut because they’d done nothing wrong. The special grand jury determined that they had — at least to the standard of probable cause. And they decisively rejected Trump’s underlying stolen election lie — a lie that a solid majority of Republicans continue to believe.