People can debate whether Georgia special grand jury forewoman Emily Kohrs’ media tour is wise — but it doesn’t appear to be illegal.
That’s the case even though she seems to be divulging quite a bit, because grand jurors in Georgia are barred from sharing their “deliberations,” which doesn’t necessarily cover the information that Kohrs has been sharing on air and in print.
Even Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury, made clear in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that grand jurors are barred from revealing, as he put it, “the discussions they had amongst themselves when it was just the grand jurors in the room … when they were discussing what do we do with what we’ve learned.” The AJC said the judge also said grand jurors are not prohibited from discussing “the fruit of their deliberations, which would be the final report.” (The special grand jury’s report is still mostly sealed.)
So Kohrs talking about her observations of certain witnesses, for example, wouldn’t count as revealing any “deliberations,” however eyebrow-raising those observations might be.
Nonetheless, objections about Kohrs’ speaking out have been raised by people concerned with securing convictions for Donald Trump and his allies in the election interference investigation, as well as by lawyers who would be defending against any charges. Yet, it’s unclear specifically how those lawyers would successfully challenge Kohrs for speaking to the media about her experience. These potential claims become even more attenuated when you consider that the special grand jury can’t even return indictments.
So whatever else there is to say about Kohrs’ media tour, it’s unlikely to sink any charges against Trump or his allies.
Therefore, we’re talking about potential legal challenges based on a person speaking publicly about her experience, as she apparently has the right to do, and this isn’t even the person sitting on the grand jury that would actually be returning any indictments. So whatever else there is to say about Kohrs’ media tour, it’s unlikely to sink any charges against Trump or his allies. What this all brings into focus, however, is that any charges in Georgia would still need to come through a regular grand jury, thus raising the question, once again, of what Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis meant when she said last month that decisions from her office were “imminent.”
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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