Georgia Grand Jury Finds Potential ‘Perjury’ in Trump Probe, Calls for ‘Appropriate Indictments’

The Georgia special grand jury investigating former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election believes that at least one of the witnesses that testified before it last year committed perjury, according to portions of the jury’s final report released Thursday.

The six pages released publicly do no name any names, but the report from the 26-members of the special grand jury is clear that panelists believed “perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before” the body.

The jury also recommended that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.” The report notes that the grand jury “contained no election law experts or criminal lawyers.”

The portions of the report released Thursday included no details about why the special grand jury believed at least one witness had committed perjury. Notably, the report mentions no other potential criminal charges other than perjury. Some had speculated that Willis could pursue racketeering charges in connection with the investigation.

Willis, a Democrat, has said a decision on whether to bring charges in the case is “imminent.” During her investigation, she subpoenaed some of Trump’s closest Republican allies, including Mark Meadow’s, the former president’s chief of staff, and U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina. Trump has called Willis a “Radical Left Prosecutor,” and accused her of targeting him for political gain.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, black, white, Democrat or Republican,” Willis previously told CNN. “If you violated the law, you’re going to be charged.”

The grand jury was selected in May, heard evidence from 75 witnesses from June through December, and disbanded in January. During that time the jury heard “extensive testimony on the subject of alleged election fraud,” and voted unanimously that “no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election.”

On Monday, Georgia Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney ordered that the introduction and conclusion of the special grand jury’s findings be made public, along with specific sections of the report dealing with concerns about witnesses lying under oath.

There is a “compelling public interest in these proceedings and the unquestionable value and importance of transparency require their release,” McBurney said on Monday.

The judge added that the special grand jury “provided the District Attorney with exactly what she requested: a roster of who should (or should not) be indicted, and for what, in relation to the conduct (and aftermath) of the 2020 general election.” However, those details were not included in Thursday’s limited release.

McBurney ruled that the rest of the report would be withheld from the public until Willis decides if she will pursue any legal charges. Among the Trump allies who could find themselves in the legal crosshairs of Georgia prosecutors are Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and the state’s Republican Party chief, David Shafer.

“We’re at the cusp of something consequential, I think,” Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, told the New York Times earlier this week

The grand jury investigation was triggered by the now-infamous January 2021 phone call between then-president Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, Trump called for Raffensperger to “find” the roughly 12,000 votes he needed to reverse the election results in the state.

The call was placed just days before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building.

“For the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that,” Raffensperger wrote in a 2021 memoir, Integrity Counts.

The special grand jury met between May and December 2022, during which they heard evidence from 75 witnesses, the vast majority of whom cooperated under sworn oath. The report further clarified that no members of the panel were “law experts or criminal lawyers.”

Unlike a typical grand jury, a special grand jury submits its findings to a district attorney, who then decides whether or not to pursue criminal charges.