Stung by criticism of their work after their foreperson went public, five more members of the special Georgia grand jury that investigated interference in the 2020 election gave anonymous interviews to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in which they defended their seriousness and impartiality and revealed the existence of another potentially incriminating call to a state official by then-President Donald Trump. The three male and two female jurors gave more glimpses of the panel's eight months of work while declining to talk about internal deliberations or share indictment recommendations, which Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has yet to act on publicly.
After their foreperson, Emily Kohrs, gave multiple interviews hinting at numerous indictment recommendations, detractors from Trump's legal team and others said the investigation was unprofessional and politically tainted. “I just felt like we, as a group, were portrayed as not serious,” one of the jurors said. “That really bothered me because that’s not how I felt. I took it very seriously. I showed up, did what I was supposed to do, did not do what I was asked not to do, you know?” One new revelation from the interviews came when jurors said they heard a recording of a phone call Trump placed to Georgia House Speaker David Ralston in which the president asked the fellow Republican to convene a special session of the Legislature to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. Ralston, who has since died, declined. The speaker “basically cut the president off. He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just basically took the wind out of the sails,” one juror said. “‘Well, thank you,’ you know, is all the president could say.” One of the jurors described how the 75 witnesses they heard from or were told about fell into three buckets. The first set, who they questioned early on, were generally forthcoming. The second was witnesses who needed to receive subpoenas but were willing to talk. The third was people who clearly did not want to be there and had fought their summons. They were the last witnesses jurors heard from, and many had at least at one point been close to Trump. Jurors’ accounts of the proceedings largely aligned with Kohrs’. But one area where they differed involved the jury’s role in the decision not to subpoena or ask Trump to voluntarily testify. Kohrs previously told the Journal-Constitution that the jurors chose not to invite Trump to testify, but one juror now says the group never discussed summoning the former president.
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