Grand Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Sees Perjury by Witnesses, but No Vote Fraud

The catalyst for the investigation was the call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” 11,780 votes, or enough to overturn his loss in the state.

Mr. Trump, in a statement on Thursday, correctly noted that the published excerpts “do not even mention President Trump’s name.” He said that it was his “constitutional duty to ensure election safety, security and integrity,” and that during his “perfect” phone calls to Georgia officials, “no one objected, even slightly protested, or hung up.”

But Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly told Mr. Trump on the call that the state’s results were accurate.

He later wrote in a book that “for the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that.”

Legal experts have said a number of Georgia criminal charges could apply to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger, among them first-degree criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which is a felony.

But the investigation also looked at a number of other issues. Another source of potential legal jeopardy for Mr. Trump, experts say, is his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors in the weeks after the 2020 election, a plan that played out even after President Biden prevailed in three different counts of the vote.

“Donald Trump was already very likely to face charges in Georgia,” said Norman Eisen, a lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump. He said the jury’s conclusion that there was no widespread election fraud “fatally wounds any defense he might have, any factual or legal defense that he might have for his misconduct.”

Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, said “although the portions released today do not name specific persons to be indicted, the document filed in court today nonetheless is of historic importance.”