Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 “unnerving.” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump’s efforts to get his state’s lawmakers to intervene a “fruitless exercise.” David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost “the craziest thing I ever heard.”
Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by The New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president’s efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election.
He has also said he wanted to “lead a movement” to ban voting machines and mail-in ballots in time for the midterm elections this year.
The transcripts were part of the investigative file in the case brought by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who obtained indictments of Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies on election interference charges in 2023. The case was dismissed in November after Ms. Willis was removed from prosecuting the case.
The interviews were conducted by a special purpose grand jury that was convened in Atlanta as part of Ms. Willis’s investigation. In Georgia, these kinds of grand juries are somewhat rare. Unlike ordinary grand juries, the special-purpose kind do not issue indictments; rather, they allow prosecutors to present everyday citizens with testimony and documents and receive recommendations before seeking an indictment. In this case, the special-purpose grand jury recommended indicting more than twice as many Trump allies as Ms. Willis eventually charged.
The skepticism that some of Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans expressed in their testimony about his claims is probably something that Georgia prosecutors would have emphasized to a trial jury if their case against Mr. Trump had not been derailed.
Senator Graham, the veteran South Carolina lawmaker, recently called Mr. Trump “the greatest president of all time.” But his 2022 testimony came at a time when Mr. Trump’s political future was uncertain. At that time, Mr. Graham expressed exasperation over the president’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims, telling the grand jurors, “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”
He called the Trump campaign’s plan to enlist fake electors in swing states where the president had lost the election “weird — I don’t know what to tell you, just weird.” He attributed Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in Arizona not to fraud, as Mr. Trump and his allies claimed, but rather to Mr. Trump’s bashing of the state’s longtime senator, John McCain. And he said that weakness with suburban voters had hurt Mr. Trump in a number of swing states.
“The McCain effect in Arizona was real,” Senator Graham told the grand jurors. “And when you look through the suburbs in the states in question, you sort of had a common pattern where President Trump ran behind other Republicans. I was trying to convey that to him.”
“I’m sorry he lost,” Mr. Graham added. “But he lost it.”
Mr. Ralston, the powerful Georgia House speaker from 2010 through 2022, testified a few months before his death. In December, The Times obtained and released a recording of a call Mr. Trump made to Mr. Ralston in late 2020, urging him to call a special session of the state legislature to overturn Georgia’s election results.
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Mr. Ralston recounted the call in his testimony, saying that “right off the bat, I’ve got to tell him I disagree with him.”
In addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Ralston, some other details from the grand jury testimony have previously been reported by The Times and other news outlets, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as in books like “Find Me the Votes,” by the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.
The Times obtained the transcripts after the judge who presided over the Georgia case, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, lifted an order that had barred defense lawyers from disclosing much of the material they had received as part of the discovery process.
Mr. Kemp, now in his final year as governor because of term limits, became known for refusing to bend to Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In his testimony before the special grand jury, he said Mr. Trump urged him to convene a special legislative session, and to order an audit of ballot signatures.
Mr. Kemp did neither. He testified that a special session would have been “a distraction” at a moment when Republicans needed to focus on approaching runoff elections for both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats. He also felt, he said, that seeking a “change in the law in the middle of an existing election would never stand up in court and would just be a fruitless exercise.”
“President Trump was very persistent, as you can imagine, and repeatedly asked for things,” Mr. Kemp testified, “and I repeatedly told him, you know, what the law was here.”
Another Georgia Republican who testified before the special grand jury was Chris Carr, the state attorney general, who is running for governor this year. Mr. Carr said in his testimony that in a call with Mr. Trump after the 2020 election, the president urged him to stop lobbying other state attorneys general against joining a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas.
Mr. Paxton filed the suit against Georgia and three other swing states, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the four states from casting their electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. and to extend the deadline for certification of presidential electors. The court ultimately rejected the suit.
Mr. Carr testified that he believed the Texas suit to be “legally, factually and constitutionally wrong,” but he told the president that he was not reaching out to his fellow attorneys general about the matter.
In his testimony, he said he told Mr. Trump that “we’re just not seeing the things that you are seeing.”
Mr. Carr and Mr. Kemp did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday, and Mr. Graham’s office had no immediate comment.
Senator Graham was among those who were recommended for indictment but were not ultimately charged in the case. In his testimony, he described the president as a friend with whom he played golf fairly regularly.
A prosecutor asked him whether the president cheated at golf.
“Some people say you may outdrive him, but you’re not going to outdrive his caddy,” Mr. Graham replied. “It is what it is.”
Richard Fausset, a Times reporter based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice.
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