Let’s get the ball rolling so Fox News doesn’t have to: These Georgia grand jurors are so woke, they probably got a restful night of sleep last night. They’re so woke they probably didn’t even have to drink coffee today. They’re so woke they probably go on dates with Hunter Biden to Silicon Valley Bank in the morning.
OK cool. The Atlanta Journal Constitution dropped some very cool new reporting and interviews with the grand jurors in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow the free and fair 2020 election in Georgia. If you’re already cringing hearing “Georgia grand jurors talking to media,” worry not. These people are anonymous and it appears they’re being very careful about blabbing any information they shouldn’t.
What they are telling us, though, is fascinating. For instance, Trump made yet another PERFECT CALL trying to overthrow the election. There was the most famous one — the “find me 11,780 votes” one, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. There was the one to Frances Watson, the lead investigator in the secretary of state’s office, when he pressed her to get to the “right’ answer on what happened in Georgia.
And now we have Trump’s third perfect call, which jurors heard, to Georgia Republican House Speaker David Ralston, telling him to convene a special session of the Georgia Legislature to overturn Joe Biden’s win and give it to him. Ralston, as we know, did not do that.
One juror said Ralston proved to be “an amazing politician.”
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,” the juror said. “‘Well, thank you,’ you know, is all the president could say.”
We feel like there’s a pattern here.
A juror the AJC talked to spoke of crying in their car at the end of the day, particularly days when they’d hear testimony from people whose lives Donald Trump ruined because he’s a weak sore loser who doesn’t love himself and can’t look his unending failures in the face.
Among the most compelling witnesses, various jurors said, were Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who had received death threats after being singled out by Trump and his then-attorney Rudy Giuliani. Another mentioned Eric Coomer, the onetime executive for Dominion Voting Systems, who left his job after being vilified. Also mentioned was Tricia Raffensperger, the wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who broke down when describing the vitriol and threats leveled at her, one juror said.
“I was pretty emotional throughout the whole thing,” a juror said. “I wouldn’t cry in front of any of the witnesses, but when I would get in my car, I was like, I just left that and I have to just go do my job now?…. I just know things that are hard to know.”
They talked about how they want people to know how serious their deliberations were — especially after the media tour their foreperson took — and the respect for the system and the people who administer it they came away with.
Donald Trump Destroys People’s Lives
GA Grand Jury Foreperson Is Telling Us What We Want To Hear. She Should Stop That.
They talked about understanding the gravity of what they were participating in, as they confronted lockdowns and being protected by SWAT teams and bomb-sniffing dogs. The latter happened the day seditious bastard Michael Flynn showed up and, of course, refused to answer questions.
Speaking of, they talked about the three kinds of witnesses they heard from: those who came freely, those who came under subpoena but answered freely, and those who fought tooth-and-nail and then refused to answer questions, often people who had been in Trump’s inner circle. Those people annoyed the shit out of them, not because of any preconceived notions they had about people taking the Fifth — hearteningly, prosecutors made sure they didn’t have those — but because they knew it was going to take forever and be tedious as fuck.
Of course, jurors report that sometimes when those dicks would refuse to answer questions, prosecutors would helpfully play videos of them talking elsewhere, to fill out the record.
Jurors dropped some details about what some folks did say to them. This quip from Lindsey Graham is getting a lot of play:
“He said that during that time, if somebody had told Trump that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it,” the juror said.
Such a pathetic damned idiot.
One juror talked about how gross it was seeing certain witnesses speak one way to them and then go back out on the campaign trail and say election-denying garbage. But these last quotes are a bit more uplifting:
“I can honestly give a damn of whoever goes to jail, you know, like personally,” one juror said. “I care more about there being more respect in the system for the work that people do to make sure elections are free and fair.”
Said another juror: “I tell my wife if every person in America knew every single word of information we knew, this country would not be divided as it is right now.”
The grand jurors said they understand why the public release of their full final report needs to wait until Willis makes indictment decisions.
“A lot’s gonna come out sooner or later,” one of the jurors said. “And it’s gonna be massive. It’s gonna be massive.”
Well, that gives us hope, because unlike that very nice juror who doesn’t care who goes to jail, we are much meaner than that and we would like to see at least 10 people buried underneath Guantanamo over this, starting with Mr. Perfect Calls himself.
Speaking of, let’s see if he’s going berserk or anything.
We’ll mark that one down as a “yes.”
[AJC]
Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter right here!
And once that doesn’t exist, I’m also giving things a go at the Mastodon (@evanhurst@newsie.social) and at Post!
Have you heard that Wonkette DOES NOT EXIST without your donations? Please hear it now, and if you have ever enjoyed a Wonkette article, throw us some bucks, or better yet, SUBSCRIBE!