GA. GRAND JURY URGED INDICTMENTS
Forewoman talks publicly about panel’s investigation
A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments for multiple people on a range of charges in its report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said Tuesday.
“It is not a short list,” forewoman Emily Kohrs said in an interview.
Kohrs, 30, declined to identify people recommended for indictment, since the judge handling the case decided to keep those details secret when he made public a few sections of the report last week. But seven sections still under wraps deal with indictment recommendations, Kohrs said.
Special grand juries in Georgia do not have indictment powers. Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis has led the investigation and will decide what charges to bring before a regular grand jury.
Asked whether the jurors had recommended indicting Trump, Kohrs would not answer directly but said: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science.” In the slim portions of the report released last week, jurors said they saw possible evidence of perjury by “one or more” witnesses who testified before them.
“It is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”
The investigation in Atlanta has been seen as one of the most significant legal threats to Trump as he begins another run for the presidency. In November, the Justice Department named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee two Trump-related criminal investigations. And last month, the Manhattan district attorney’s office began presenting evidence to a grand jury on whether Trump paid hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months.
A focal point of the Atlanta inquiry is a call that Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” 11,780 votes, or enough to overturn his loss in the state.
“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicized,” said Kohrs, who was first identified by The Associated Press earlier in the day and told the outlet that some witnesses had arrived at the courthouse with immunity deals in place.
But the call was not the only turn of events after the 2020 election that came under the special grand jury’s scrutiny. Another was Trump’s direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors, a plan that played out in Georgia even after President Joe Biden prevailed in three different counts of the vote.
“We definitely talked about the alternate electors a fair amount, they were absolutely part of the discussion,” Kohrs said. “How could they not be?”
The jury also looked into hearings before state lawmakers in December 2020, orchestrated by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, at which Giuliani and others advanced a number of falsehoods about the election. Giuliani is among nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of Willis’ investigation; so is David Shafer, head of the Georgia Republican Party.
“We talked a lot about December and things that happened in the Georgia Legislature,” Kohrs said.
The special grand jury was discharged last month. Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who is handling the case, has not barred jurors from talking to reporters, but has sought to limit what they discuss — in particular when it comes to describing their deliberations. Kohrs is the first of the 23 jurors, and an additional three alternates, to speak out.
The jury heard evidence from June to December in a courthouse in downtown Atlanta and heard testimony from 75 witnesses, including Giuliani; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff; and Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., as well as a number of election experts. Trump was not among the witnesses, and his lawyers have said that he did nothing wrong.
At first, Kohrs said, “we talked a lot about the bare bones of the concept of vote fraud in Georgia,” hearing from various experts and exploring the finer points of how the state’s voting machines work.
“We found unanimously that there was no evidence of vote fraud in Fulton County in the 2020 election,” Kohrs said. “We wanted to make sure we put that in, because somehow that’s still a question.”