Redacted portions don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know, but the strong suggestion is that the special grand jury recommended criminal charges.
Hope you weren’t waiting at the edge of your seat on this one.
As we noted on Monday, Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney directed that today would be the day for the release of three portions of the final report prepared by the special state grand jury that has been investigating Trump-campaign efforts to undo the 2020 election result in Georgia. The redacted report has now been published, and it tells us nothing we did not already know.
This was a foregone conclusion. In his ruling, Judge McBurney directed that only three portions of the special grand jury’s report be released: the introduction, the conclusion, and a section recommending that people the grand jury suspects lied in the their testimony be prosecuted. McBurney, moreover, ordered that no personally identifying information or evidence of wrongdoing by individuals be publicized at this point; otherwise, he reasoned, the due-process rights of those (for now) uncharged persons would be violated.
Consequently, we were unlikely to learn much. And so we haven’t.
As I explained in the above-referenced post, pursuant to Georgia law, the special grand jury only conducts investigations and makes recommendations; it does not return indictments. Whether formal charges are sought is now up to the elected district attorney, Democrat Fani T. Willis. Indeed, the fact that she has not yet decided who, if anyone, to charge is the reason that the special grand jury’s final report has not been published in full.
With that said, the final report explains that the special grand jury spent the last seven months of 2022 scrutinizing “the facts and circumstances relating directly or indirectly to possible attempts to disrupt the lawful administration of the 2020 presidential elections in the State of Georgia,” hearing testimony from about 75 witnesses.
In its introduction, the grand jury states: “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.” This conclusion, the major one published today, is no surprise. It tracks the state investigations that followed the election. It is stated emphatically, it appears, to reject the Trump campaign’s contentions to the contrary — which follows from the fact that the other report portions released suggest that the special grand jury has recommended that charges be filed (again, we don’t yet know against whom and for what offenses).
Regarding false testimony, the final report states:
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.
We were told this was coming in McBurney’s ruling on Monday. As today’s succinct, sweeping statement does not identify which witnesses are believed to have lied and what about, there isn’t much to say about it. I’d simply add that perjury is easier to recognize than it is to prove. That is, it’s usually not hard to tell, in real time or even reading from a transcript, when someone has given misleading or suspicious testimony. But perjury is often a hard crime to prove because it requires that the questions be crystal clear and the answers be plainly, intentionally false. A lot of false testimony falls in the gray area, and it’s a simpler matter to conclude that someone’s overall testimony is false than to parse out individual, provably false statements. Ergo, the fact that the grand jury has recommended perjury prosecutions doesn’t necessarily mean there will be perjury prosecutions.
Finally, in the report’s conclusion, this seems to be the most important assertion — a caveat rather than a finding:
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.
The grand jurors elaborate that they are not “election law experts or criminal lawyers.” If I were a target or subject of the investigation, this excerpt would concern me. We’re reading tea leaves here, but my interpretation is that the grand jury not only found what it believes to be crimes, but is also sufficiently offended by what it heard that it is worried there may be additional crimes that it failed to detect so that it could recommend even more charges than it has.
For now, though, we just don’t know. The ball is in Willis’s court, and we will have to see if she persuades other grand juries to file indictments. On that, there is no time table.