The complete special grand jury report from Fulton County, Georgia, was released today, after a judge ruled against the Trump legal team, who did not want it released.

However, the full scope of what this grand jury – which Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had assembled to hear evidence and give recommendations; they were not given the power to charge anyone – wanted to do is more insane than anyone expected. The special grand jury got wild and crazy with the idea of “INDICT ALL THE THINGS!” and we should have known that when the special grand jury forewoman got on national television and absolutely yukked it up about the power they had been granted and bragged about how many people were on their list for potential indictments.

That is a classic case of being drunk on power. But that special grand jury got so nuts in their attempt to recommend charges for everyone, right down to the ham sandwiches they had for lunch, that even Fani Willis had to pull back on their recommended indictments.

You'll recall that the foreperson of the grand jury went on national television to hype the indictments and play partisan attack dog.

Basically, even Fulton County's Democratic DA had to temper the grand jury's enthusiasm for going after every Republican they could name. https://t.co/GjXiHURY7B

— Sunny McSunnyface (@sunnyright) September 8, 2023

This is wild, wild stuff.

Included among the list of recommended indictments were two former senators from Georgia who ran for reelection in 2020, former Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Georgia Lt. Gov Burt Jones.

The report, released in full Friday after a failed effort from Trump to bar its sharing, details the May charging recommendations from a group of 22 jurors tasked with hearing evidence in the case.

After the report was partially released in February, the foreperson of the grand jury made news by suggesting it would include few surprises.

No kidding. The newly-released report also includes the important fact that the recommendations were not unanimous.

Graham, Loeffler, Perdue and Flynn all faced recommended charges “with respect to the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

Thirteen grand jurors voted to recommend indicting Graham, while seven voted no and one abstained. They voted 17-4 to recommend indicting Perdue and 14-6 for Loeffler.

“One of the dissenting jurors voting against recommending seeking indictments of former Senators Perdue and Loeffler on a RICO 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,” the report states.

With a 16-1 vote, the grand jury overall recommended Perdue also be indicted as part of the “persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees” between November 2020 and January 2021.

And that’s not even the complete list – those are just the biggest names. Basically, the special grand jury recommended indicting anyone who had ever expressed concerns or opinions about the state’s voting results – even a Georgia Republican state senator who wanted to call for a special session to deal with the fraud claims. If someone was an elected official, or a high-profile attorney, and questioned the Georgia election results, then the special grand jury apparently wanted them indicted.

The truly crazy part about voting to indict former Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler is that, as people who can remember the 2020 election will recall, these two were in a RUNOFF election after the November vote! They and their campaigns had every right to be questioning election results, especially since the vote counts were so tight that they both went to a runoff election that was held in January 2021! OF COURSE they were concerned about the election results, and questioning them! Now, as we can also all remember, the runoff elections were a disaster. Both Perdue and Loeffler lost, flipping both seats to the Democrats, and clearly, the election claims being made by Donald Trump and their campaigns didn’t help them win votes. This quirk of Georgia election law that requires a runoff if no candidate reaches 50% of the vote bit the GOP hard, since Perdue led Jon Ossoff in the first election and had 49.7% of the vote.

But to recommend indictments for them both, plus tossing in Lindsey Graham and Michael Flynn for supporting Donald Trump? YIKES.

The final report for Special Purpose Grand Jury is chilling in recommendations to indict Sen. Graham and former senators Purdue and Loeffler as well as others who engaged in clearly protected political speech…

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 8, 2023

…This report has all of the focus and restraint of a drive by shooting. As indicated by the giggling foreperson Emily Kohrs, the report suggests a visceral, if not recreational, impulse in targeting well-known political and legal figures. https://t.co/x2zNpCJeZe

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 8, 2023

I will dissent with the professor inasmuch as I don’t think that this report exonerates the Fulton County District Attorney’s office. It just means that Fani Willis, who clearly had a political agenda to begin with, took one look at the recommended list and said “hey, even I’M not that stupid.” But Turley is right to ask exactly WHERE the grand jury got the idea that they could just recommend indictments for all, and let God or Fani Willis sort it out later.

I’m also not sure why the Trump team objected to the release of this report, either. As far as raw information and proving that the Fulton County special grand jury was obviously biased against them, I think this ends up being a win in the court of public opinion, and perhaps a win in court later. Emily Kohrs, our favorite gigglebox grand jury forewoman, may yet see her interviews, combined with this report, doing real damage to the RICO case that Willis is pushing in Georgia court.

Featured image via succo on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license