Trump Attorney: Trump Investigation in Georgia ‘Compromised’

Former U.S. President Donald Trump (L) speaks at the New Hampshire Republican State Committee's Annual Meeting in Salem, N.H, on Jan. 28, 2023. Emily Kohrs (R), foreperson of the Fulton County Special Purpose Grand Jury, speaks to MSNBC about the proceeding in an interview on Feb. 21, 2023. Scott Eisen/Getty Images; screenshot taken on from a video published in an MSNBC article

Attorneys representing former President Donald Trump in a special purpose investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, say the investigation process has been compromised due to public remarks made by a member of the grand jury.

“We’ve lost 100 percent confidence in this process. We feel this process has been compromised,” Trump attorney Drew Findling said in an interview with CBS News’s Face the Nation on Feb. 26, when CBS host Robert Costa asked how Findling viewed the position of Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis.

“We absolutely do not believe that our client did anything wrong, and if any indictments are to come down, those are faulty indictments,” Jennifer Little, another defense attorney for Trump, told Costa.

Findling was referring to a special purpose grand jury investigation initiated by Willis, who says she intends to investigate Trump and his allies for what she describes as their “attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election.”

While the jury panel does not have indictment powers, it can recommend indictments to the DA based on its findings—and the DA can then decide whether to pursue those indictments.

However, the DA’s ability to move further on the case may be in peril after the foreperson of the grand jury, Emily Kohrs, gave high-profile interviews to The New York Times, CNN, and NBC about the case, Trump’s lawyers say.

“This 30-year-old person, to us, has actually provided us a lens and made us aware that every suspicion we had as to this questionable process was in fact a reality,” Findling said.

Kohrs’s Media Appearances

According to Trump’s attorneys, the issue with Kohr’s high-profile appearances in the media centers on the principle of maintaining distance between prosecuting attorneys and members of a jury.

“It looks like they lost perspective over keeping separation between prosecuting attorneys and the members of this grand jury,” Findling told CBS News in the Feb. 26 interview. “There cannot be a relationship. When the foreperson uses the word ‘we’ that lets you know there’s a relationship there. When she says in interviews ‘certain battles were not worth us battling,’ it’s not the special purpose grand jury that’s litigating, it’s the district attorney’s office.”

Kohrs told the New York Times that the jury panel recommended indictments on people who were subpoenaed, and provided the publication with some details of the proceeding.

“It is not a short list,” Kohrs told the New York Times, referring to the currently sealed list of indictment recommendations. She did not reveal specific names of people for whom the panel recommended indictments, but they could be anyone who was subpoenaed as part of the investigation, such as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), among others.

Further to the New York Times interview, Kohrs told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in another interview on Feb. 21 that she also spoke to her boyfriend regarding her experience in the panel’s proceedings.

“I told my boyfriend at one point during proceeding, during all this, I came home and I told him,” she said, “Do you know that if I was in a room with Donald Trump and Joseph Biden and they knew who I was, they would both want to speak to me.”

In a separate interview with MSNBC, Kohrs said, “I wanted to subpoena the former president because I got to swear everybody in, and so I thought it would be really cool to get 60 seconds with President Trump of me looking at him and being like, ‘Do you solemnly swear,’ and me getting to swear him in. I kind of just thought that would be an awesome moment.”

Trump’s attorney said Kohrs’ appearances raise the question of whether DA Willis can proceed with charging Trump if she intends to do so.

“Are the results of that special purpose grand jury to be crumbled up like a piece of paper and thrown into a waste paper basket?” Findling continued when asked about their next steps.

“Our options are, can this district attorney’s office continue to be part of this case? We have to legally research all of those issues.”

Trump’s Response

Former President Donald Trump has rejected all of the accusations against him in Georgia, and criticized Kohrs’ media tour as “prosecutorial misconduct.”

“There is no case against me in Georgia because I did NOTHING WRONG, but in any event, and everyone agrees, the out of control Foreperson who did an illegal and unprecedented Media Tour DURING the process, makes the case dead for a second reason,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, on Feb. 25.

“TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME coupled with Prosecutorial Misconduct!” he wrote.

In an earlier post, the former president commented that the grand jury investigation was 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,” Trump wrote. “All I did is make TWO PERFECT PHONE CALLS!!!”

A major focus of the investigation is a call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, when Trump told Raffensperger to investigate potential voter fraud in Georgia.

Critics of Trump have alleged that the call constituted an act of election interference. Trump has denied all allegations of wrongdoing on his part.

The grand jury was discharged in January. In early February, the Fulton County Superior Court released a portion of the jury panel’s final report, which did not include the list of names to whom indictments were recommended.