No, the Georgia Grand Juror’s Media Tour on Trump Hasn’t Doomed the Case
Emily Kohrs’s comments on the case aren’t the end.
A media tour this week by the forewoman for the Georgia special grand jury on Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election has raised concerns across the board, especially after reports that the former president’s team might use her comments to block possible indictments.
Emily Kohrs gave five interviews to media outlets over the last two days, during which she discussed parts of the special grand jury’s report, including indictment recommendations. She stopped short of saying who exactly had been recommended but said people won’t be “too surprised” by who’s on the list.
Her comments raised widespread concerns that Trump’s legal team could use them to crush any possible charges. CBS News reported Thursday that lawyers were preparing to argue that Kohrs had corrupted the legal process.
Two of Trump’s lawyers told The New York Times that Kohrs had “poisoned” the pool of potential jurors of a potential regular grand jury, which would issue the criminal indictments. They also slammed her “flippant, jovial, almost disrespectful approach” to the investigation in general.
Trump himself took aim at the forewoman, calling the special grand jury a “strictly political continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time.”
“Now you have an extremely energetic young woman, the (get this!) “foreperson” of the Racist D.A.’s Special Grand Jury, going around and doing a Media Tour revealing, incredibly, the Grand Jury’s inner workings & thoughts. This is not JUSTICE, this is an illegal Kangaroo Court,” he wrote Wednesday on Truth Social.
“All I did is make TWO PERFECT PHONE CALLS!!!”
Many legal experts agreed, however, that Kohrs’s comments are unlikely to affect the outcome of the case. She didn’t give away any confidential information, and the grand jury can only recommend indictments. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will make the final call on whether to bring charges against people. Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, tweeted that the Trump team’s attempts to use Kohrs’s media tour to quash indictments was “not gonna work.”
But legal experts also agreed that what Kohrs did was unprecedented and incredibly inappropriate. “Kohrs’s media tour isn’t helpful, and feeds into Trump’s argument that the grand jury investigation is a political witch hunt by a Democratic district attorney and the left-leaning mainstream media,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Newsweek.
Former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Bromwich called Kohrs a “reckless idiot” on Twitter, while Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told MSNBC that in his 25-year career, he had never seen a grand juror of any kind speak out the way she has.