ATLANTA: A Georgia grand jury recommended criminal charges against Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham and other allies of Donald Trump as part of its investigation into efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential defeat, said a report released on Friday.

None were ultimately charged when Georgia prosecutors filed a sweeping criminal case against Trump and 18 alleged co-conspirators.

The special grand jury recommended charges against Graham as well as Georgia’s two US senators at the time, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the report said. Like Trump, all are Republicans.

Graham, a Trump rival turned golf buddy, denied wrongdoing and said he was fulfilling his oversight duties as the top lawmaker on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he asked Georgia officials to examine absentee ballots after Trump’s defeat.

“We can’t criminalise senators doing their job,” he said at a news conference in South Carolina on Friday. “The next election, if I have questions I’ll do the same thing.” The panel also recommended charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, adviser Boris Epshteyn and lawyers Lin Wood and Cleta Mitchell, the report showed.

It was unclear why Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis opted not to bring charges against the six people, and her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The six were among 39 people the special grand jury recommended charging in its Dec 15 report, which had been sealed for nine months. Unlike the final criminal indictment, it did not detail specific allegations.

The special grand jury did not have the power to issue charges, but Willis used the evidence it gathered to seek an indictment of Trump and his 18 co-defendants from a regular grand jury last month.

Responding to the report’s release on Friday, Trump said it showed Willis’s case was politwically motivated. “They wanted to indict anybody who happened to be breathing at the time,” he wrote on social media.

‘Political persecution’

Trump and the other defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty. As with his three other criminal prosecutions, Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of political persecution.

Loeffler and Perdue, both Trump loyalists, were defeated by Democratic candidates in January 2021 runoff elections. Perdue ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022. Neither immediately responded to a request for comment.

“This baseless witch hunt isn’t based on the facts, or the law, or reality,” Flynn’s lawyer Jesse Binnall said in a statement. Flynn, a prominent figure on the far right, had urged Trump to use the military to overturn the 2020 election.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2023