Georgia Grand Jury Wanted To Indict Lyndsey Graham, Michael Flynn, and Boris Epshteyn in Addition to Trump

Newly released court records from Fulton County, Georgia, show a grand jury that indicted President Trump and 18 co-defendants also recommends charges be brought against Senator Graham and other elected officials. The document, which was released by a judge Friday, discloses for the first time the legal peril faced by Mr. Graham and two of his former colleagues, Senators Perdue and Loeffler of Georgia. Following their months-long deliberations, grand jurors at Atlanta recommended that the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, charge Messrs. Graham and Perdue and Ms. Loeffler “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”Speaking to reporters in South Carolina on Friday, Mr. Graham said, “What I did was consistent with my job as being a U.S. senator, chair of the Judiciary Committee. I think the system in this country is getting off the rails, and we have to be careful not to use the legal system as a political tool.” The grand jury also recommended that Mr. Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, face charges along with Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Burt Jones. Ms. Willis ultimately did not follow the grand jury’s recommendation with respect to those individuals. Of the 21 grand jurors, 13 voted to recommend charges against Mr. Graham, while seven voted against and one abstained. With respect to Mr. Perdue, 17 voted in favor of the charges, while four voted against. For Ms. Loeffler, 14 jurors voted in favor of charging her. Mr. Perdue also faced potential charges for his “persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials” seeking to overturn the election results. In total, 16 grand jurors voted to indict the former senator. One individual who features prominently in the document is a powerful Republican lawyer, Cleta Mitchell. Ms. Mitchell served as a state representative in her native Oklahoma in the 1970s and 1980s and was at the forefront of GOP efforts to claim that Democrats have engaged in a “very well-planned-out assault” on fair elections nationwide. The grand jury recommended that Ms. Mitchell face charges for her involvement in the attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election as well as her involvement in assembling a false slate of electors that was to be sent to Congress from Georgia. The grand jury also recommended charges be levied against an advisor to Mr. Trump, Boris Epshteyn, as well as lawyer Lin Wood, who aided the effort to overturn the Georgia results. The jurors noted in their recommendations that they believed “that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses” and directed Ms. Willis to “seek appropriate indictments” for such violations. The recommended charges against the South Carolina senator likely stemmed from a 2020 phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. In the days after the presidential election, Mr. Raffensperger told the Washington Post that Mr. Graham had called him shortly after the Peach State had been called for President Biden. “He asked if the ballots could be matched back to the voters,” Mr. Raffensperger later told CNN about his conversation with the senator. “And then he, I got the sense it implied that then you could throw those out for any, if you look at the counties with the highest frequent error of signatures. So that’s the impression that I got.” Mr. Raffensperger said, “It was just an implication of, ‘Look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’”Mr. Graham eventually sat for an interview with the Fulton County grand jury, but only after a lengthy court battle where he argued that participating in such an investigation would set a bad precedent for subpoenaing United States senators who were “trying to gather information in connection with doing their job.”Of his call with Mr. Raffensperger, Mr. Graham told the Associated Press that the secretary of state’s claim that he was attempting to have him throw out votes was “ridiculous.” Mr. Graham was “trying to find out how the signature stuff worked,” he said.

Georgia Grand Jury Wanted To Indict Lyndsey Graham, Michael Flynn, and Boris Epshteyn in Addition to Trump

Georgia Grand Jury Wanted To Indict Lyndsey Graham, Michael Flynn, and Boris Epshteyn in Addition to Trump

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