The Georgia grand jury which recommended charges against former president Donald Trump and 18 other co-defendants also sought to indict three senators, according to a new report.
The grand jury voted to recommend indictments against Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and former Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. However, the three were ultimately not charged by federal prosecutors.
A total of 19 defendants were charged in relation to election interference in Georgia in 2020. All have pleaded not guilty to the charges against them.
The New Report
Released on Friday, the new report provides details on who was investigated by the grand jury and how close they came to being prosecuted.
The grand jury recommended charges against 39 people in total, of which 19 were accepted by prosecutors. The panel spent months interviewing scores of witnesses, and were given special investigative powers.
Of the 23 members on the panel, some decisions were split. Two jurors voted against recommending charges for individuals accused of posing as false electors on the grounds that they had been “misled to understand what was their civic duty.”
Almost all jurors were in agreement to charge Trump and his top attorneys, including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. However, there was a greater divide over whether to charge the current and former senators.
Senator Split
The report notes how one juror believed Loeffler and Perdue were “pandering to their political base” when they made false statements about the election results when they were running for re-election, but added that did not make them “guilty of a criminal conspiracy.”
As a relatively slim report, there is no mention of why they would incur possible charges. Nevertheless, much is known about their public and private actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Both publicly backed Trump’s repeated statements of election fraud despite no evidence during recounts and audits.
Loeffler defended her actions in a statement, claiming she was “speaking out in defense of election integrity.”
Sen. Graham, on the other hand, was investigated for a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ask whether a number of postal ballots could be thrown out. He denied the accusations on Friday, saying that it was a call to do his job over a legitimate concern of possible voter fraud.
“I feel comfortable with the questions I asked,” he said. “At the end of the day, I did my job.”
Much like Trump, Sen. Graham framed the recommended indictment against him as politically motivated. The former also released a statement on his social media platform Truth Social, in which he said the grand jury report had “zero credibility” and added that jurors sought to “indict anybody who happened to be breathing.”
Shay Bottomley is a British journalist based in Canada. He has written for the Western Standard, Maidenhead Advertiser, Slough Express, Windsor Express, Berkshire Live and Southend Echo, and has covered notable events including the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
