Georgia special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham and former senators – live

All told, the special grand jurors in Georgia recommended charges against 39 people for trying to overturn the state’s elections, but Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis’s indictment only targeted 19 people, Donald Trump among them.

Among those who were named in the report, but not charged:

David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were Georgia’s Republican senators, until both were ousted from office by the Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in elections held the day before the January 6 insurrection.

The special grand jury in Fulton county recommended that Perdue be charged “over the persistent, repeated communications directed to multiple Georgia officials and employees between November of 2020 and January of 2021” – the period when Donald Trump was trying to overturn his election loss. The vote was 16 jurors in favor, one against, and one abstention.

The jurors also recommended charges against both Loeffler and Perdue for “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”. However there was more dissent on this count. For Perdue, the vote was 17 in favor and four against, while for Loeffler, the vote was 14 in favor, 6 against, and one abstention.

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis ultimately did not indict either of the former lawmakers.

Lindsey Graham’s name appeared early as Donald Trump’s attempts to stay in the White House began shortly after his re-election defeat in November 2020.

Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger told the press that the South Carolina senator had called him to ask if it was possible to throw away mail-in ballots in counties crucial to Joe Biden’s win in Georgia. From the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino’s report at the time:

Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said that Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether it was possible to invalidate legally cast ballots after Donald Trump was narrowly defeated in the state.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Raffensperger said that his fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, questioned him about the state’s signature-matching law and asked whether political bias might have played a role in counties where poll workers accepted higher rates of mismatched signatures. According to Raffensperger, Graham then asked whether he had the authority to toss out all mail-in ballots in these counties.

Raffensperger was reportedly “stunned” by the question, in which Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” he said.

Graham confirmed the conversation to reporters on Capitol Hill but said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that he pressured Raffensperger to throw out legally cast absentee ballots. According to Graham, he only wanted to learn more about the process for verifying signatures, because what happens in Georgia “affects the whole nation”.

“I thought it was a good conversation,” Graham said on Monday after the interview was published. “I’m surprised to hear he characterized it that way.”

Trump has refused to accept results showing Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, falsely blaming rampant fraud and irregularities that election officials in both parties have dismissed as meritless.

The special grand jury investigating the attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results recommended bringing charges against the state’s former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler as well as the current South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.

None of the three were named in the indictment Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis unveiled last month, which targeted Donald Trump and 18 others with racketeering charges related to their attempt to stop Joe Biden from collecting Georgia’s electoral votes despite his victory there.

According to the report, the jurors recommended the three senators be charged over “the national effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”.

The full report of the special grand jury whose investigation led to the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result has been released.

We’re digging into it and will let you know what it says.

The special grand jury report that was used in the indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others in Georgia for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 election results is expected to be released any minute now.

While parts of it have already been unsealed, we will finally be getting a look at the full report by the jurors empaneled by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis. There are two main pieces of news expected from the report:

• Whether the grand jurors recommended charges be brought against people who Willis ultimately opted not to pursue.

• The vote counts for each person the jurors said should be indicted, and whether there were any significant splits within the panel.

Yesterday, Ron DeSantis had a testy exchange with an audience member who accused the Republican governor of backing policies in Florida that enabled violence against Black people – such as last month’s shooting by a racist gunman in Jacksonville:

Clearly smarting over the exchange, DeSantis later went on Fox News to call the questioner a “nutjob”:

While Joe Biden is in India for a meeting of G20 leaders, Republicans angling to replace him next year are continuing their campaigns, including Ron DeSantis – who may have done himself more harm than good by skipping a meeting with the president after a hurricane struck Florida. Here’s the story, from the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe:

One reality of Florida politics is that a bad hurricane for the state traditionally blows good fortune for its governor. It was true for Rick Scott, elected a senator in November 2018, one month after guiding Florida through Category 5 Hurricane Michael; and again for Ron DeSantis, whose landslide re-election last year followed his much-praised handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.

This year, however, DeSantis is struggling to shake the dark clouds of Hurricane Idalia, as his return to the national stage to try to rescue his flailing presidential campaign after an 11-day break has been further scarred by his “petty and small” snub of Joe Biden’s visit to Florida last weekend to survey the storm’s damage.

Opponents seized on it as a partisan politicization of a climate disaster, contrasting the Republican Florida governor’s approach to a year ago after Ian, when DeSantis and Biden put their differences aside to praise each other and tour the worst-affected areas with their respective first ladies.

“Your job as governor is to be the tour guide for the president, to make sure the president sees your people, sees the damage, sees the suffering, what’s going on and what needs to be done to rebuild it,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, and a rival for the Republican presidential nomination, told Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade.

“You’re doing your job. And unfortunately, he put politics ahead of his job,” added Christie, who was applauded by Democrats and savaged by Republicans for working closely with Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy mauled his state in 2012.

The Twitter/X account of Joe Biden, who is currently flying on Air Force One to New Delhi for a summit of G20 nations, just released video showing him touring the renovated situation room.

That’s the space in the White House where the president goes to handle emergencies or highly sensitive operations:

Perhaps the most famous appearance of a president in the situation room is Barack Obama’s from 1 May 2011, as he watched US soldiers kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. His photographer Pete Souza captured the scene:

Yesterday, Donald Trump indicated he may ask that his trial in the Georgia election subversion case be moved to federal court, which the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported could have a number of advantages for the former president:

Donald Trump’s lead defense lawyer notified a judge in Fulton county on Thursday that he could soon seek to remove to federal court the racketeering prosecution charging him with attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

The unusual filing, submitted to the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, said only that the former president “may seek removal of his prosecution”, stopping short of submitting a formal motion to transfer the trial venue.

Trump has been weighing for weeks whether to seek removal to federal court and, according to two people familiar with deliberations, is expected to make a decision based on whether his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is successful in his own effort.

The idea with waiting on a decision in the Meadows case, the people said, is to use him as a test. If Meadows is successful in transferring to federal court, the Trump legal team is intending to repurpose the same arguments and follow a similar strategy.

To have the case moved to the US district court for the northern district of Georgia, Trump would have to show that the criminal conduct alleged in the indictment involved his official duties as president – he was acting “under color of office” – and cannot be prosecuted at the state level.

The rationale to seek removal to federal court is seen as twofold: the jury pool would expand beyond just the Atlanta area – which skews heavily Democratic – and a federal judge might be less deferential to local prosecutors compared with judges in the Fulton county superior court.

The Georgia special grand jury report that is expected to be released at 10am ET today could reveal whether the investigative panel thought anyone else besides Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants should face charges for meddling in the state’s election result three years ago.

Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis convened the panel and used its subpoena power to compel witness testimony, and portions of its final report have already been released. The special grand jury did not indict Trump – that was done by one of the regular grand juries she convened in August.

Good morning, US politics live blog readers. It’s going to be another big Friday in one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump, while US president Joe Biden is in India for G20 and a crucial bilateral with the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Here’s some of what’s ahead:

• The report of the special grand jury in Georgia that investigated Trump in the election subversion case – where the now-former president attempted to overturn the 2020 election in the swing state – is expected to be unsealed today.

• Biden is due to touch down in New Delhi, India, in under two hours, a day before the start of the G20 summit there. He and Modi will hold a bilateral meeting shortly after the US president arrives. The specter of Russia’s war in Ukraine looms over the event.

• Speaking of criminal cases against former US presidents, on this day 49 years ago Republican president Gerald Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon” to former president Richard Nixon covering his entire term in office, the AP notes.

• Trump will attend a rally tonight in South Dakota and the state’s rightwing governor Kristi Noem is expected to endorse his run for the 2024 Republican nomination for the White House. Noem is considered a vice-presidential hopeful.