The High-Profile Players of the 2020 Georgia Presidential Election: Mark Meadows, J. D. Willis, and a Special Purpose Grand Jury
The report doesn’t say what charges the high profile players are facing, but they are listed along with 23 others in relation to the national effort to overturn the election.
In a 9-page report fully unsealed by a judge Friday, the special purpose grand jury told Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis they recommended prosecutors seek indictments against the former president for his Jan. 2, 2021 call with Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he pressed the state’s top election official to overturn his already-certified defeat.
He took the stand and testified about his position as chief of staff, as well as the things prosecutors say were done to subvert the election of Donald Trump.
The latest development in the case involves former President Donald Trump and 19 other people who are alleged to have been involved with a conspiracy to rig the 2020 Georgia presidential election.
“The Court finds that the evidence presented does not show that most of the remaining overt acts were related to the scope of Meadows’ role as Chief of Staff,” he wrote, adding that Meadows “cannot have acted in his role as a federal officer with respect to any efforts to influence, interfere with, disrupt, oversee, or change state elections.”
At an August 28th hearing, he argued that he was an officer of the United States and that his charges should be moved out of Fulton County, Ga., Superior Court and into federal jurisdiction.
A federal judge has denied former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s request to move his Georgia election interference charges under federal jurisdiction.
Several high-profile Republicans found in the jury’s report did not face charges in the 94-page indictment handed up last month in Fulton County.
The special panel, which interviewed more than 75 witnesses but did not have the power to issue indictments, found 39 different people allegedly violated more than a dozen state laws including making false statements and writings, solicitation of election fraud and Georgia’s sweeping anti-racketeering law.
The Perdue and Loeffler Indictment: A Report on the Associated Proceedings of the 2019 Georgia House of Representatives, Revised, and Reconsidered
Perdue and Loeffler called for Raffensperger to resign and made false claims about Georgia’s election results before losing in Jan. 2021 runoffs that saw some conservative voters stay home because of their claims. Graham called Raffensperger after the election and discussed if the secretary of state could reject certain absentee ballots.
Ultimately, the decision of who to charge with what rests with the district attorney’s office and a regularly empaneled grand jury, and the special jury’s inclusion of many names like Perdue, Loeffler and Graham neither indicates cooperation with prosecutors nor possibility of future charges.
In a footnote, the report makes clear that “one of the dissenting jurors voting against recommending seeking indictments of former Sens. Perdue and Loeffler on a racketeering claim believes that their statements following the November 2020 election while pandering to their political base, do not give rise to their being guilty of a criminal conspiracy.”
There are many charges and characters found in the indictment including Trump, his onetime personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a former Georgia Republican Party Chair.
Judge Robert McBurney ordered the report to only be made public after allowing the introduction, conclusion, and a section about witnesses lying under oath to be made public. Due process concerns of anyone who might not be later charged are not violated by those sections, McBurney wrote.