ATLANTA (AP) — The foreperson of a Georgia special grand jury investigating potential 2020 election meddling by Donald Trump went public this week, laughing in interviews and sharing anecdotes about the proceedings, including that shaking Rudy Giuliani’s hand was her “coolest moment.”
Emily Kohrs, 30, first spoke in an Associated Press interview published Tuesday, a story that was followed by interviews with other print and television news outlets.
She shared details about what happened behind the closed doors of the jury room — including how some witnesses behaved, how prosecutors interacted with witnesses, and how some witnesses invoked their rights not to answer certain questions.
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In media appearances, Kohrs smiled and laughed while describing her role in the proceedings, sometimes making faces. In an interview with MSNBC, she excitedly described her “coolest moment” as shaking the hand of Rudy Giuliani, former president Trump’s lawyer.
“My coolest moment was shaking Rudy Giuliani’s hand,” Kohrs said during the Wednesday appearance. “That was really cool for me. I made a point of stopping them and being like, ‘Wait, before you go back to this, can I shake your hand?’ Because this... an honor to meet the guy. It was really neat for me.”
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kohrs described an exchange with her boyfriend in which she expressed her opinion that Trump and President Biden would want to speak with her.
“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.”
She also told the AJC that she swore in one of the witnesses who appeared before the grand jury while holding a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles popsicle she got at an ice cream party thrown by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s office.
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Trump’s lawyers in Georgia are criticizing the Fulton County investigation after Kohrs’s media appearances.
Trump attorneys Drew Findling and Jennifer Little said that despite having concerns about the panel's proceedings from the start, they kept quiet out of respect for the grand jury process. But they said revelations offered by Kohrs this week compelled them to speak up.
“The end product is the reliability of anything that has taken place in there is completely tainted and called into question,” Findling said in an interview with the AP on Wednesday evening. He said he held “no chagrin for a 30-year-old foreperson” who was part of "a failed system.”
“She’s a product of a circus that cloaked itself as a special purpose grand jury," he said.
Findling and Little said they are on top of all the legal issues in the case and are keeping their options open. They had not filed anything by Thursday morning.
The special grand jury was impaneled at the request of Willis, who is investigating whether Trump and his Republican allies committed any crimes as they tried to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia. The panel did not have the power to indict but instead could offer recommendations for Willis, a Democrat who will ultimately decide whether to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.
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Willis’ office has declined to comment on Kohrs’ media appearances, other than to say they weren’t aware ahead of time that she planned to give interviews. Spokesperson Jeff DiSantis also declined Thursday to comment on Findling's and Little’s comments.
Findling and Little expressed concern that the special grand jury, which they said was supposed to base its recommendations to the district attorney on evidence and testimony presented in the jury room, was allowed to watch and read news coverage of the case and was aware of some witnesses’ efforts not to testify. Kohrs said prosecutors told the jurors they could read and watch the news but urged them to keep an open mind.
Findling and Little said the district attorney’s office, which was advising the special grand jury, should have done a better job of educating the grand jurors about the solemnity of the process and the rules and limitations.
“It’s not a joking matter,” Findling said. “It’s not a matter for giggles. It’s not a matter for smiles.”
Trump himself lashed out in a post on his social media network Wednesday, calling the Georgia investigation “ridiculous, a strictly political continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt of all time.” He expressed dismay at Kohrs “going around and doing a Media Tour revealing, incredibly, the Grand Jury's inner workings & thoughts.”
Though Kohrs did not publicly name any individuals the special grand jury recommended for possible indictment, Findling and Little claimed she seemed to implicate Trump in response to media questions about indictments. That’s a problem, Findling said, because they have examined the evidence and remain convinced that “our client did not break any law at all.”
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The Trump lawyers also said that this situation could have been avoided if the judge had instructed special grand jury members not to speak to news outlets until after the panel's full final report is made public. Several parts of the report were released last week, but Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney said any section that recommended specific charges for specific people would remain secret for now.
During a hearing last month, a lawyer for a coalition of news outlets, including the AP, had urged the immediate release of the full report.
In the federal system, grand jurors are prohibited from talking about what witnesses said or anything that happened in the room. But the oath taken by grand jurors in Georgia only says they cannot talk about their deliberations.
The grand jury was dissolved on Jan. 9, and McBurney told the AP that he later met with grand jurors to discuss where things stood. He said he provided them with the “rules of the road” of what they were legally allowed and not allowed to discuss publicly.
He said they could discuss what witnesses said and what is in the report but could not talk about deliberations because that's what their oath said.
Little said she believes some of the things Kohrs discussed in interviews were part of deliberations, including when she talked about decisions to recommend multiple indictments and the reasons why the grand jurors did not seek to bring Trump in to testify.
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Willis has said since the beginning of the investigation two years ago that she was interested in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump suggested to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, that he could “find” the votes needed to overturn Trump's loss to Biden in the state.
“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said during that call.
Over the more than two years since Willis’ investigation began, it has become clear that her investigation has expanded to other areas, including a slate of fake Republican electors who swore that Trump had won the state and a breach of election equipment in a rural south Georgia county.