The breaking news this morning, a final unredacted report.
And right here from the Fulton County
special grand jury has just been released.
Jurors listing a total of 39 people
they said should face charges
for efforts to overturn the election results.
That's 20
plus additional people than what the district attorney
eventually sought charges against.
Among those in this full report,
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and two former
senator from Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
The special grand jury recommended that they face charges.
The district attorney did not end up charging them there.
These are the 19 people that the district attorney
has charged into is alleged has taken part
in a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump
to overturn the 2020 election.
These are the mug shots.
These are the 19 charged.
What is the difference between this report
and what we are dealing with what we are looking at
with these not with the eventual indictment.
CNN's Evan Perez, Paula Reed,
they're standing by with details on this poll.
Let me start with you.
What are your major takeaways from this?
Well, I want
to think about these in two groups in terms of the people
who were not charged.
Let's first start with the lawmakers as Senator
Lindsey Graham and former Georgia Senators
Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
And these are probably going
to create the biggest headlines here, particularly Senator
Lindsey Graham, because he's a sitting senator.
But when you look at the vote count,
sort of how the members of the special grand
jury came back, it was clear they were divided
on whether these individuals should be charged.
There was a recommendation, but it was not unanimous.
And it wasn't just one person voting no.
So it's pretty clear why
the district attorney would not proceed with charges,
because this is the most friendly environment
possible for her case. Right.
You don't have lawyers in the room with witnesses.
You don't have a defense presentation.
There isn't a high bar you can indict.
A ham sandwich is, of course, the famous saying
this is not beyond a reasonable doubt.
So if you have problems with a case
in before a special grand jury,
you're going to have big problems in a real courtroom.
It's pretty clear why she wouldn't proceed
against these three individuals for the country.
The other group
that we're all talking about, which is a group of Trump
advisers, Cleta Mitchell, Mike Flynn and Borsch Epstein,
Well, Flynn and Epstein tend to advise Trump
at the national level after the election
where Cleta Mitchell
was actually on the ground in Georgia.
But here, these recommendations, the math,
the votes from the special grand jury mirror
those of people who are actually charged
like Rudy Giuliani or former President Trump.
So that's going to actually raise a lot of questions
about exactly why they were not charged.
But, Kate, I think another big question
that's going to be out
there is whether we should have access to all of this
Of course, CNN was one of the media outlets
that pushed to have this historic document unsealed.
But usually, grand jury proceedings
are done in secret to protect witnesses
not to give them the freedom
and the sense of security to speak freely
and also to protect people who are not ultimately charged.
Because now we have all these names out there
we have the math for how they voted in terms
of recommending that be charged.
But they don't actually have a mechanism or a process
to to clear their name
besides the fact that they weren't charged.
So far in the state of Georgia.
What we've seen is consistently they have aired far
on the side of transparency.
We have cameras in the courtroom
so anyone can watch these proceedings, even the mundane
scheduling and logistics proceedings.
We also saw, though, the members of this special
grand jury,
their names were published with this indictment
and many of them,
I have been doxed online and face threats.
And now we get access again to this historic document,
something CNN and other outlets pushed for.
But there is a balance when it comes to transparency.
And that's going to be part of the conversation
going forward as well.
All right, Paul, thank you for that.
Evan, let me bring you in on this.
What are you picking up about the other officials
that are not charged here that we're learning about?
Well, right
there are 21 names
that are listed on this list of 39 names, people
who were recommended that they were,
but they brought charges against
that ended up not being charged.
And of course, the names,
some of them, Paula, just just pointed out
the names of officials right.
People in very high level positions
who were very, very much involved in trying to either
pressure state officials to try to find this
the alleged fraud that Donald Trump
and his allies said existed and of course, didn't.
And of course, some of them
went to extraordinary means from them.
We saw in public of course.
But Lindsey
Graham, obviously, the fact that he is a sitting senator,
the one that that certainly has spoken a lot to you,
you've seen him
talk to reporters about what he thought was going on,
the idea that the grand jury
ended up voting 20 votes
to one to two to bring charges
and then the district
attorney decided not to bring those charges.
Obviously, it's
a big question that I think will persist after today.
The other thing that obviously will come from this is,
you know, what exactly did turn up in this investigation?
Is there something else that might come out in
some of the discovery that we might see later on?
Again,
those are big questions that are going to be going forward
in the weeks and months as this case goes forward.
Of course, there is
there's also know David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, two
former senators, both of them lost their seats
in the end, partly because of their efforts
associating themselves
with the former president's
claims of of a fraud, which turned out
not to be in the case of Perdue,
he pushed for the governor
to actually have a special session,
something that,
of course, of the former president was pushing for,
wanted to make sure that the legislature intervened
to try to throw the votes
that the election results in that state and then make way
for the slate of false electors,
which are also named, by the way, Kate, in this
in this document that the false electors
were named by the grand jury, it was a much closer vote.
There were only nine votes to indict them in the end.
Obviously, that didn't happen.
But what's interesting, obviously, is,
you know, the role of these high level officials
that some of which of you
obviously played out in public view.
And in the end, finally, will is decide
decided for whatever reason that she was not going
to bring those charges, perhaps
because of the additional political implications of it
and the difficulty that that would present
for her case Kate.
Interesting.
Evan, thank you so much.
Paula, thank you as well.
Going to continue working their sources on this, Sara.
All right.
We want to talk about sort of the politics of this.
I want to get straight to CNN chief
congressional correspondent Manu
Raju, who was up on Capitol Hill.
Manu, you have talked to Senator Graham about this.
I mean,
the biggest revelation really from this,
because really what we have here is, you know, who
the grand jury thought should be indicted,
who wasn't indicted and what the law is
we don't have all the details on exactly how
they got to that place and all of the evidence
that was put before the grand jury
in this 25 or 26 page report
But you had a conversation with Lindsey Graham
about all of this, and he's obviously a sitting senator,
and the one that's going to make the most news, frankly,
from this.
What did he say and what was your takeaway,
your biggest takeaway from your conversation?
Yeah, I recall
this is right after the 20, 20 elections
there was bad Raffensperger
who spoke publicly about this phone call
that he had with Lindsey Graham he believed that
Lindsey Graham was essentially pressuring him
or wanted to get rid of legally
valid ballots and that could in reference
review disenfranchize the voters of Georgia.
Now, that is something that Lindsey Graham flatly
denied when I asked him about that allegation.
He contended that he was not even talking
about the 2020 presidential race.
He said he was talking about the mail
in voting system in Georgia and how the signature
verification system worked and how that would work.
Heading into a very, very critical
Senate race in two Senate races in Georgia in January.
2021.
There were the two Senate races the runoffs there
that ultimately Democrats won
and took back control of the majority.
Lindsey Graham claimed that that was in focus entirely
and he pushed back on Raffensperger's claims
What I'm very concerned
about is that if you don't continue to vote by mail,
that we need to know what systems work
and what don't it's up to the people of Georgia.
I think I have every right in the world
to reach out and say, how does it work?
And that's what it is, really.
I thought a pretty good conversation.
So, I mean, he thinks is an implicit threat, but
I categorically reject.
That wasn't my intent
and that was the purpose of the conversation.
Throw out ballots.
We're talking about election winning we have here,
which is the Senate races.
That was my focus.
It's how do you verify
signatures will get in the Senate race coming up?
Is there anything we can do to make it better
So you're concerned about the Senate races more than
what's happened.
But the whole thing was about
I mean, they've got a process.
You can't change the law retroactively.
So there's just no way to do that.
Whatever system was in place
for the presidential election, we're going to live.
That whole conversation was about the Senate race.
Now, it's
unclear why the special grand jury, a majority of these,
the jury of Grant's
special grand jury recommended charges.
Whether Graham's testimony was different
anyway, whether there was additional evidence
about Senator Lindsey Graham's efforts voted 13
in the affirmative to try to pursue charges,
seven in the negative in the special grand jury
so that this report does not detail
any of that specifically.
We do know
that Lindsey
Graham did ultimately testify
before the grand jury in Georgia
after he fought
a subpoena,
did not want to testify, did not think he would believe
that was it was appropriate to bring
a sitting senator in to testify before this panel.
He took it to court.
They fought it.
He ultimately lost that fight and did cooperate.
And then afterwards, I did talk to him about the testimony
before the grand jury.
He said he cooperated fully, but he refused
to provide any details about that testimony.
I asked him also did he expect to be charged?
He said flatly he did not expect to be charged.
So it's unclear
how he's going to respond to this specific recommendation
at the moment.
His office has not yet commented about this.
But as you can hear there from those comments
back in 20, 20, he claims he did nothing wrong.