New Trove of Fulton County Case Materials Published
Lawfare expects to publish more materials obtained from the case file, as well as additional reporting and analysis drawn from these materials.
Shortly before midnight on Aug. 13, 2023, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis stood before a clutch of reporters assembled in a government office building in downtown Atlanta, where she announced a 41-count indictment against Donald J. Trump and 18 others over an alleged conspiracy to overturn Georgia's 2020 presidential election.
The indictment followed more than two years of investigative work, which included the empanelment of a special purpose grand jury that heard from more than 60 witnesses. Investigators also compiled troves of cell phone records, emails, and text messages. And they conducted dozens of hours of recorded interviews with witnesses, putative targets who reached immunity agreements, and defendants who later struck plea deals.
In the end, that evidence would never surface at trial. The prosecution was derailed in 2024, when the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis following allegations that she had improperly benefited from a romantic relationship with an outside prosecutor, Nathan Wade, whom she had hired to lead the case. A newly appointed special prosecutor, Pete Skandalakis, subsequently declined to pursue the charges.
Following dismissal of the case, the presiding judge, Scott McAfee of the Fulton County Superior Court, lifted a protective order that had prohibited lawyers involved in the case from disclosing certain materials produced during discovery.
Lawfare obtained a large tranche of materials from the investigative file and is publishing them. Last week, that began with the publication of 61 special purpose grand jury transcripts.
Today, Lawfare is publishing a collection of audio and video recordings from the case file—the vast majority of which have not been previously published.
Editor's note: This virtual reading room is a work in progress built with the assistance of AI. Please contact Lawfare with any errors or corrections.
The recordings generally fall into two categories: interviews and proffer sessions conducted by the Fulton County District Attorney's Office as part of its election interference investigation, and interviews conducted by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) as part of a separate but related probe into an unauthorized breach of voting equipment in Coffee County, Georgia.
The Coffee County breach figured prominently in the Fulton County indictment. Two defendants, Sidney Powell and Scott Hall, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges related to it. The GBI materials became a part of the Fulton County case file after the agency shared its investigative findings with Willis's office in 2023. Lawfare previously obtained and published the GBI’s investigative report on the Coffee County breach. Many of the audio recordings published today are interviews that the GBI report references—heard here for the first time.
Among the most significant materials in today's release are proffer sessions recorded with four defendants who pleaded guilty early in the prosecution. The recordings include the proffers of Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked on Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 election results; Kenneth Chesebro, the attorney credited with developing the fake electors strategy; Powell, a lawyer who allegedly funded the Coffee County breach; and Hall, the bail bondsman who chartered a jet to Coffee County and was among the first defendants in the case to plead guilty. While portions of these sessions were previously reported by ABC News, the recordings published here include never-before-seen excerpts that have not previously been made public.
The recordings also include interviews with Georgia officials and witnesses central to the election interference investigation: Frances Watson, the former chief investigator with the Georgia Secretary of State's office, who received a call from Trump pressing her to find evidence of fraud; Ryan Germany, the former General Counsel for the Secretary of State's office, who was present during Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call with Brad Raffensperger; Gabriel Sterling, the former Chief Operating Officer of the Secretary of State's office; former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan; and Richard Barron, the former Elections Director for Fulton County.
Also included are interviews conducted pursuant to immunity agreements with five of Georgia's fake Trump electors—Brad Carver, Carolyn Fisher, Kay Godwin, Joseph Brannan, and CB Yadav—as well as a previously reported recording of a phone call between Trump and the late Georgia House Speaker David Ralston.
Lawfare is publishing the materials in the condition in which they were obtained. In some instances, the audio quality is poor or the recording appears incomplete. Some recordings include redactions for personal identifying information, such as phone numbers or the names of minor children.
In the coming weeks, Lawfare expects to publish more materials obtained from the case file, as well as additional reporting and analysis drawn from these materials. Until then, the materials published here offer the most detailed insight yet into what investigators learned about an alleged conspiracy to overturn a democratic election—a record that, in the end, was never tested at trial.
