ATLANTA — Fulton County prosecutors are asking the public to wait a little longer to review the final report issued by a special grand jury that investigated interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.
With just weeks until Fulton District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to seek indictments against former President Donald Trump and others, her office asked the Georgia Court of Appeals on Monday to block release of the report “at least until final charging decisions have been made.” In their report, the grand jurors recommended multiple people be criminally charged, several members previously told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Donald Wakeford, one of Willis’s deputies, wrote, “if a special purpose grand jury’s report, requested by and intended for a district attorney’s evaluation, became a presumptively public court record with immediate effect, a prosecutor’s use of a special purpose grand jury would risk revealing information which would otherwise remain protected until the termination of the case in any other criminal investigatory context.”
The filing came in response to an appeal filed by a coalition of media organizations, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which argued that the report was a court record subject to disclosure and that the public interest demanded that the full document be released.
The outlets asked the court to overturn a February decision from Fulton Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney in which he ruled that the rights of future defendants needed to be protected, even though grand jurors had requested that their recommendations be made public.
“There was very limited due process in this process for those who might now be named as indictment-worthy in the final report,” McBurney wrote.