Bearing Witness

I'm probably going to be subpoenaed by the Fulton County District Attorney's office to testify in the Trump investigation. Behold my journalistic dilemma.

The fake electors on December 14.

Folks, if you subscribe to The Atlanta Objective, you probably associate my work with smart coverage of the crime problems in Atlanta, for which I’ve won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Georgia Writers award, the “Good Trouble” award from the Center for Civic Innovation and — as of last Thursday — the award for best public service newsletter in America from the Society of Professional Journalists. Here, I’m a crime writer.

But I’m first and foremost a political journalist. And as it happens, I was reporting on December 14, 2020, the day Georgia’s electors were meeting at the state capitol to cast their votes for Joe Biden.

I got a call from an investigator working for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office on Monday. He was very polite, using a nonthreatening Kermit the Frog voice I’ve learned to recognize (and regularly use) as a starting place for difficult questions.

He had seen the social media posts I made from December 14, 2020, and wanted to know if I would be willing to offer testimony to the special grand jury examining 2020 election interference.

I had expected this call.

A little background. I was a member of the Occupy Wall Street operation in Atlanta in 2011-2012, which was how I became broadly acquainted with people engaged in political action in Georgia. I still talk regularly to self-identified antifa activists, and to people in the patriot movements, along with mainstream politicians across the political spectrum.

Over the years I’ve been tracking radical and extremist political activity in Georgia as a journalist, from three-percenters to Black Hebrew Israelites. I’ve staked out Klansman’s houses. I’ve filed open records requests to get at sovereign citizen paper terrorism. I’ve been enough of a regular at Stone Mountain protests for the public safety director has my number in his phone. Tracking this stuff is why I found myself on the receiving end of a beating when militants took over the site of the Rayshard Brooks shooting in 2020.

So when Nick Fuentes and Ali Alexander showed up on the steps of the Georgia Capitol in the days after the November 2020, calling for vigilante justice while a crowd containing groypers and Proud Boys cheered them on, I took notice.

“The Trump supporters who are protesting at the Georgia capitol right now are overrepresented by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites,” I wrote on November 21 after watching the circus. “I'm not defining them as such because I don't like them. I am literally noting who is in the street. Chester Doles, a neo-Nazi skinhead from North Georgia. Nick Fuentes and the "groyper" movement guys. Red Elephants founder Vincent James Foxx. Enrique Tarrio, a Proud Boys leader, is trying to goad people into fighting with his crew. We're not talking about close calls or matters of nuanced opinion. Hard core racist white nationalists and anti-Semites, and their close followers. That's a majority of who is in the street.”

Alex Jones had taken to circling the capitol in an armored personnel carrier calling for an armed revolt.

After seeing this, it occurred to me that these nitwits might try to disrupt the vote of electors at the capitol on December 14. So I went to watch.

I knew most of the Democratic electors, like State Senator Steve Henson, who represented my district at the time. I also knew a handful of the Republican electors. And as it happened, around 11 a.m., I saw one of them in the hallway.

Twenty-year-old C.J. Pearson had been a social media presence in far-right circles in Georgia since he was 14. He and I have had conversations in private messages for years. He was a Republican elector.

I asked him what he was doing at the capitol. He ignored me, and went into a room south of the east staircase on the first floor. I looked around for minute, asking other reporters what’s gong on in there, then I launched a Facebook live and walked in.

I asked the people there what they were doing. One of them, a woman, said they were having a meeting. What’s it about, I asked? “Education,” she replied. Someone then said loudly that I had a camera going, and another quicky ushered me out of the room. From that point, they had someone standing in front to guard the door.

They lied to me. Straight up.

Excitedly, I called my editor at The Intercept to say that I had found a room full of Republicans trying to vote a fake set of electors. She didn’t think it merited a story at the time. Go figure.

Rooms in the capitol have to be reserved by a sitting member of the General Assembly. I spent the day trying to track down whoever reserved it. I discovered later that it had been reserved by the speaker’s office at the behest of Ray Smith, an attorney working for Donald Trump’s campaign.

A couple of hours after I barged into the room, I spoke to David Shafer, who was leading the fake elector effort. He told me that they were submitting their electors as a legal necessity, to preserve their claims in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Georgia election. This is also what he told Greg Bluestein, the AJC’s inestimable political reporter … who has also been subpoenaed.

The AJC said it intends to file a motion to quash the grand jury subpoena. I am considering the same. Honestly, I haven’t made up my mind. It’s going to depend on a subsequent conversation with the office to limit the scope of questions.

Journalists cannot act as agents of the government. Georgia has a longstanding tradition and legal precedent providing for “reporter’s privilege” to prevent journalists from being used as a witness in a case. The reason for that is pretty basic: if a source believes that whatever they tell a journalist off the record is going to end up on the record anyway because of a subpoena, they’ll be far less interested in talking to reporters, and the public will have a poorer understanding of what’s happening.

There are reporters who will refuse to even enter a grand jury room. The proceeding is secret. I will never be allowed to say exactly what I’ve discussed in there if I testify. I talk to lots of people who think I’m half a cop as it is, never mind how critical I am of police power. A subpoena to testify doesn’t help.

The thing is, the reporter’s privilege bends under extraordinary circumstances. And, honestly, how much more extraordinary does it get than a case that might send Donald Trump to prison. Frankly, I don’t think my sources will give a shit in this narrow circumstance, as long as that’s all the grand jury asks me about.

My life is weird.

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