Senator Lindsey Graham and former Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue narrowly escaped charges for their role in trying to overturn the 2020 election, according to a new report from the Georgia grand jury.
Trump and 18 co-defendants were indicted in August for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results and charged with felony racketeering. The special grand jury’s full report was released Friday, and it revealed that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had left several major players out of her 41-count indictment.
The grand jury had also recommended that Graham, Loeffler, and Perdue be indicted for their role in trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. Other people Willis left out include Trump’s lawyers Boris Epshteyn and Lin Wood, former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, and Republican strategist Cleta Mitchell.
Graham, a steadfast Trump loyalist, had been summoned to testify before the grand jury over a phone call he had made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. According to Raffensperger, Graham asked whether the secretary had the power to throw out all mail-in ballots from certain counties.
Raffensperger told The Washington Post he felt Graham was asking him to illegally discount valid ballots. This phone call occurred a week before Trump’s own infamous phone call to Raffensperger, during which he begged the secretary to “find” the exact amount of votes needed to flip Georgia to Trump. Raffensperger held firm in both cases.
Loeffler and Perdue, also both vocal Trumpists, had embraced and actively pushed Trump’s false claim that the election had been rigged. A log of text messages that Loeffler had sent and received after the 2020 election was called for Biden showed her thought process behind deciding to challenge the vote results. Perdue, for his part, filed a lawsuit alleging that fraudulent or counterfeit ballots had been counted in Georgia’s most populous county.
Both senators were fighting to stay in office at the time. Loeffler and Perdue ultimately lost to Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in a runoff election, a historic upset that flipped the Senate to Democratic control. Trump’s repeated claims of election fraud are widely considered to be factors that led to Loeffler’s and Perdue’s defeat.