With the Breaking News in Georgia That Trump Is Almost Certain to Be Indicted, What Are We to Make of How Major Media Seems to Be Already Trying to Discredit the Indictment?

A recent interview by former Fulton County grand juror Emily Kohrs is being used by certain figures in major media to cast doubt on a Trump indictment before it happens—for no good reason whatsoever.

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Emily Kohrs is a Georgia woman who will have no direct role whatsoever in indicting Donald Trump or anyone else for Election Fraud in any of the very high-profile cases now being investigated by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

So the fact that American media has thus far been unable to discuss her acting unwisely following the end of her public service as a Georgia grand juror without also darkly intimating that her entirely legal conduct in granting post-service interviews could imperil a future Trump indictment in Georgia is a bad sign for American rule of law.

Proof certainly knew that, with a Trump indictment likely imminent—Kohrs having told media that more than a dozen recommendations for indictments issued from the grand jury she sat on, with her broad classification of the recommendations having the effect, per ABC News, of “intimating that the former president is among them”—all sorts of media figures who didn’t delve into the January 6 investigation with the ferocity Proof did would suddenly emerge from the woodwork to offer their analyses now that most of the critical reporting and synthesizing of data has already occurred.

What was less obvious was that these relative newcomers to January 6 reporting would so hyperventilate over every minor story that they’d collectively create a sense (a sense that candidly most of them have always had) that it will be impossible to hold Trump to account for anything.

So let’s summarize what we know, following the recent Emily Kohrs interviews:

1. Legal experts agree that while Kohrs may have endangered herself physically and created “bad optics” by granting interviews following her grand jury service, she did not violate any court order or any Georgia statute or regulation regarding grand jury service in doing so. Nor did she say anything that exhibited a preexisting bias against any of the 75 prospective Fulton County defendants, Trump included. There’s also no evidence that Kohrs plans on giving any further interviews, despite catty commentary suggesting that she is on a “media tour.”

2. The grand jury that Kohrs sat on doesn’t have any power to issue indictments. What it can do, and did do, is issue a report—part of which has already been made public by a Georgia judge, and the rest of which the judge plans to make public eventually—that issues recommendations to Attorney Willis that she can accept or reject. In legal terms, this means that Kohrs and her fellow grand jurors had no legal authority whatsoever. Willis could try to indict Donald Trump without a recommendation from this sort of special preliminary grand jury or choose not to try to indict him with one, so she will always be able to say that her decision was finally her own. And if down the line Trump or any other prospective defendant wants to claim that their indictment was the product of political bias—which, to be clear, they’ll all claim, no matter what the evidence is, but especially Trump, as he needs to try to delay his trial until after the 2024 presidential election—the grand jury whose conduct they’d properly be complaining of is some hypothetical future grand jury (the one that would actually indict Trump) that doesn’t exist yet.

3. Not only is nothing Kohrs said a violation of her oath as a grand juror, or a violation of any court order or Georgia statute or regulation, but it is all content, in any case, that will be reflected in the report (soon to be a fully public report) her disbanded, authority-less grand jury contributed to via its decisions. And what we will apparently discover in that report, based on Kohrs’ entirely correct assessment that this fact pattern “isn’t rocket science”, is what every lawyer who’s looked at Trump’s January 2, 2021 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger already knows: the Election Fraud case against Trump is legally and factually a slam dunk, so the only thing that can mess it up now is rank cowardice on the part of any of a number of individuals: (a) Willis, (b) the prospective petit jury (the jury that actually sits at trial) in the Trump case, (c) the judge in the Trump case, and/or, as importantly, (d) America’s sprawling corps of corporate journalists, whose bothsidesism intended to appeal to prospective right-leaning viewers and listeners could lead it to falsely portray a Trump indictment as precisely the “witch hunt” he in unhinged fashion has repeatedly claimed it to be (thereby putting extraordinary outside pressure—not ideological pressure, but public-relations pressure—on any of the aforementioned individuals to somehow bury the case rather than do their duty).

The first test of American media’s ability to act responsibly in the face of a domestic terrorist like Trump simultaneously running for President of the United States again and facing criminal indictments in multiple jurisdictions (indictments that by all rights should confine him to a cage for the remainder of his natural life) came when Kohrs did a thing she had a right to do but, as a matter of etiquette and best practices, really ought not to have done: she spoke to the media.

And media failed the test.

{Note: Keep in mind that the non-media-savvy Kohrs is not some celebrity who regularly deals with journalists, so it’s likely she gave the interviews journalists now decry at the sly insistence of several of their own peers, who really shouldn’t have even sought such an exchange both for the sake of Kohrs’ safety and the sake of the typical protocols that journalists, if not Kohrs, would have been well aware of ex ante about how grand jurors are advised to act post-service.}

Every report now written about Kohrs, even those with extremely good intentions and written by very knowledgeable and honorable lawyers, has left the impression that a Kohrs interview is not only potentially a political act but—for reasons that are often intimated at but never actually explained, presumably because (to be clear) they don’t exist—one that could imperil a future Trump prosecution. In fact, any Kohrs media appearance only does so if Willis bends to political or media or self-preservation pressures rather than upholding the rule of law, or if the eventual judge in Trump’s case (if he is indicted) makes the decision to imperil the Trump prosecution unilaterally because he or she has been influenced by some sort of pressure or fear or really anything but the fact we must keep returning to: Kohrs didn’t violate any existing prescription by giving interviews, whatever the optics of them as determined by journalists who love to call things bad optics because doing so makes for good ratings.

All of which brings us to what’s really going on here: the slow recognition that only some American journalists will have the stomach for what’s coming later this year.

What’s coming is an indictment the likes of which we have never seen before, in part because it’s that oddest of combinations, to wit, a slam-dunk case with a high-profile defendant who can rightly make only a single claim—that the prosecution of him is unprecedented. It will be journalists’ job not to confuse the fact of an indictment of Trump being historic with there somehow being something wrong or bad or biased or sinister about any prosecution of him, and it will be the job of Trump to take every “first-ever” occurrence in his case as a sign of a vast left-wing conspiracy and use that false frame to try to stir up a Second Civil War in a desperate bid to save himself.

People like Kohrs and Willis are simply public servants who have never been in a situation like this one before because none of us have. Kohrs, having infinitely less experience with the criminal justice system than Willis by virtue of being merely a grand juror rather than a lawyer, was significantly more likely to wilt in some way under the pressure of her situation and make a decision she likely wouldn’t have made if she were operating under her best judgment and with no outside pressures (e.g., from journalists using wily methods to convince her to give them a “scoop”). It is the role of responsible journalists never to frame an innocent error by a public servant as being the sort of QAnonist quackery a domestic terrorist like Trump is sure to claim it is.

America must prepare itself, as Proof wrote last year, for a year—2023—in which the unprecedented happens again and again and again. It must accept in advance that none of the oddities it sees, nor even any clear errors in judgment it may see, are the product of some nefarious plot to pervert the criminal justice system rather than the simple fact that none of us have gone through anything like this before.

While bad actors like Alan Dershowitz will likely spend 2023 trying to convince Americans (who know virtually nothing about how the criminal justice system actually works, for all that we have allowed it to be debated constantly in our domestic political tilts) that what is a slam-dunk case of Election Fraud is in fact a Democratic Party plot, these people must be ignored, exposed, and/or ridiculed at every turn.

Why? For many reasons—their lies being the biggest one—but also another one worth discussing here: if there’s one thing that both Democrats and Republicans agree on right now (and it may well be the only thing), it’s that Donald Trump is the weakest possible candidate the GOP could run for president in 2024.

So it is exponentially more likely that any attempt to scuttle the Trump prosecution is a political act (to ensure that Trump can still run for president and lose badly, again, to Joe Biden) than it is that any attempt to advance a prosecution of Trump is a leftist political scheme. Indeed, right now it is Republican leadership that privately wants to see Trump indicted and, arguably, certain members of Democratic leadership who do not. This makes certain journalists’ intimation that silly errors of judgment by civilians like Kohrs could end up being seen as free contributions to an eldritch “vast left-wing conspiracy” a canard that is doubly stupid.

So kudos to those few journalists still keeping their powder dry. Proof promises to do the same as we enter an era in which each week sees America experiencing a new first.

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