UPDATE (Feb. 16, 2023, 11:17 a.m. ET): A judge released portions of the Fulton County special grand jury’s report on Thursday. Read them here.
All eyes are on Georgia, once again, as we await the partial release Thursday of the special grand jury report on Fulton County’s 2020 election interference probe.
But there are reasons to temper our expectations, given Judge Robert McBurney’s ruling keeping much of the report secret for now, including references to specific people. No charges have been brought yet by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who would have to do so through a regular grand jury.
To be clear, we don’t yet have to temper expectations about the investigation itself. Indeed, Willis claims she wants to keep certain details secret to protect future defendants’ rights. This suggests she still is planning to bring charges, and doesn’t want those charges to get messed up by prematurely (in her view) releasing information.
To be clear, we don’t yet have to temper expectations about the investigation itself. So, to recap, while we’re not expecting the report to name names, here are the three parts that Judge McBurney said we can see Thursday: the introduction, the conclusion and, most intriguingly, a section detailing grand jurors’ concerns that some witnesses lied. Although, if the report isn’t naming names, it’s unclear what we’re going to be able to glean even from that potentially salacious section. At any rate, it’ll be a weird way to read a story, with a beginning, an end and allegations of lying sprinkled in between, all without specific characters (though Donald Trump will, of course, be the elephant in the report, so to speak). But with all of that said, I keep pausing over part of a line in Judge McBurney’s ruling on the limited release, where he concedes that publication of these three parts of the report “may not be convenient for the pacing of the District Attorney’s investigation.” It’s hard to know what that means, exactly. But it arguably undermines the idea that we aren’t going to learn much on Thursday. In the context of arguments over the report’s release, inconvenience for Willis can translate to more public disclosure. So a reader interested in as much detail as possible, as soon as possible, might want the publication of the report to be as inconvenient for Willis as possible. We’ll find out more about the report’s “convenience” on Thursday. I’m eager to get my hands on this incomplete story, and will report back with key takeaways on the blog.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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