A judge in Fulton County, Georgia, will make public some parts of a report from a special grand jury that investigated Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election in the state, but not specific charging recommendations.
In his order on Monday, Judge Robert C.I. McBurney said that the special grand jury’s introduction and conclusion as well as concerns the panel had about witnesses lying under oath will made be public on Thursday. Some of the information in those sections still may be redacted, the judge noted.
Prosecutors in Georgia have aggressively investigated whether Trump or any of his associates broke the law while trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the closely contested state.
The special grand jury, barred from issuing indictments, penned the highly anticipated final report as a culmination of its seven months of work, which included interviewing 75 witnesses from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham.
No one has been charged in the case yet, and another grand jury would make those decisions now that the special grand jury has presented its findings.
Other findings by the special grand jury won’t be public yet – particularly the parts where the report makes recommendations about potential charges. That’s because some of the people named in those recommendations may not have appeared in grand jury proceedings so far.
“Here, however, for anyone named in the special purpose grand jury’s final report who was not afforded the opportunity to appear before the grand jury, none of those due process rights has been satisfied,” McBurney wrote in the eight-page order on Monday.
“And for those who did appear – willingly or not – only the right to be heard (although without counsel or rebuttal) was protected,” McBurney added.
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