ATLANTA – Only portions of a grand jury’s final report on then-President Donald Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia will be released to the public, a Fulton County judge ruled Monday.
In an eight-page order, Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney declared that the nature of the special grand jury investigation raised due process issues for those among Trump and his associates who might be indicted following the conclusion of the probe.
There were no lawyers advocating for any targets of the investigation,” McBurney wrote. “Potential future defendants were not able to present evidence outside the scope of what the district attorney asked them.
“They could not call their own witnesses who might rebut what other state’s witnesses had said and they had no ability to present mitigating evidence. Put differently, there was very limited due process in this process for those who might now be named as indictment worthy in the final report.”
Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis empaneled the special purpose grand jury early last year to investigate whether Trump and/or others unlawfully interfered in Georgia’s election results.
A widely publicized aspect of those efforts was a phone call Republican Trump placed to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 urging him to “find” 11,780 votes, the margin Trump needed to carry Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. Raffensperger refused to cooperate, and Congress certified Democrat Joe Biden the winner in Georgia a few days later.
Willis will use the special purpose grand jury’s findings to inform her decision whether to empanel a grand jury to consider whether to indict the former president and/or any of his associates on criminal charges.
Lawyers for a coalition of media outlets filed a motion asking for the entire final report to be released. A hearing was held last month, during which Willis sought to keep the report private in order not to jeopardize the rights of potential future defendants to a fair trial.
While McBurney’s ruling Monday will keep most of the report under wraps for now, the judge ruled that three portions of the document may be released later this week.
“These three portions include the introduction and conclusion to the final report, as well as Section VIII, in which the special purpose grand jury discusses its concern that some witnesses may have lied under oath during their testimony to the grand jury,” he wrote. “Because the grand jury does not identify those witnesses, that conclusion may be publicly disclosed at this time.”
McBurney ruled that the material he is allowing to be made public will be released on Thursday.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.