The Fulton county sheriff laid orange barricades in front of the courthouse last week, anticipating a horde of protesters. Courthouse staff were asked to work from home this month. Witnesses before the grand jury contemplating charges in Donald Trump’s latest legal case arrived and departed with arrangements made for privacy and protection. People are nuts, we are reminded. Stay safe, my friends whispered.
I took a train from Stone Mountain downtown and walked in through the front door.
If you’re trying to protect yourself from rightwing political spree killers, you could do worse than getting on Marta, the local train system, because the Venn diagram of Trump hyper-partisans and people who believe they will be murdered on a subway car almost entirely overlaps.
Also, my wife needed the car for something important.
I seem to be drawing a lot of attention lately. I got on that train with Nicole Craine, a brilliant New York Times photographer, and another documentarian telling the story of Donald Trump’s indictment in Georgia. A young guy walked up to us in the car as we were setting up. “You’re that police-ass reporter writing about Young Thug?” he asked. I said I was. He wasn’t happy to see me. He walked to the back of the car, loudly proclaiming my moral failures. For wide swaths of Atlanta, the Trump indictment is less relevant to their lives than making rent, the location of the nearest police car or the conditions of the Fulton county jail.
The miracle of this moment is that for one shining instant, white people with money are suddenly as concerned about how often people get killed at the local jail on Rice Street, given the non-zero chance that Donald Trump might have to sleep there at some point if he violates a court order.
I’ve been writing about violent crime as an Atlanta political problem for the last few years. I’ve been far enough ahead of others writing about the YSL gang and racketeering case involving Young Thug that that’s how a lot of people know my work here. I’ve been a journalist in Atlanta for years in relative anonymity, but you do one VladTV interview and suddenly you get clocked walking into the Kroger.
The Trump case is an entirely different thing.
On 14 December 2020, I had gone to the Georgia capitol to cover the vote of the electors. I recognized an old friend – who would have been an elector if Trump had won Georgia – walking the halls and realized the Republican “electors” were present. I went into the room where they were preparing themselves, camera blazing, and was promptly thrown out. They told me it was an “education meeting” as I was shuffled out of Room 216.
Fani Willis’s election interference case investigators decided that was relevant enough to send me a subpoena to testify, first before the special purpose grand jury, and then again this week. And suddenly, I’m in the story.
I’ve been trying to keep reporters out of my house because I haven’t cut the grass in weeks, the siding needs to be pressure-washed and I wonder whether the beagle’s occasional incontinence will make people question my character.
Imagine how prepared you might be, today, for international media attention.
I bought tickets to the 11.15pm 70mm Imax showing on Monday of Oppenheimer a month ago to get a good seat. The next day, I got subpoenaed. On Saturday, the DA’s office said I’d be coming in on Tuesday. Monday afternoon, they moved it up to 4pm that day.
Wearing a jacket with tweedy suede professorial elbow patches, I walked past the scrum behind the barricades as I got to court. I saw photographers from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution looking for a shot, mixed in with a platoon of people from out of town. I confess that I wanted to stage-dive into the crowd across the street Chris Farley-style just to give some of the freelancers a good shot to sell, but was afraid trying might kill someone I like. A set of journalists had been camped out in Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney’s courtroom awaiting word of an indictment.
The grand jury meets on the third floor of the courthouse. I got off the elevator to see another wall of deputies. I must have passed at least two dozen on the way into the waiting room. I was familiar with some of them from covering the Young Thug trial.
I told them I was worried about the jail with so many of them here. In pre-pandemic comparison, the jail might lose two or three people to medical conditions or a suicide. At least six people have died in Fulton county’s jail on Rice Street this year, two in the last month. Fifteen died last year. Staffing trouble contributes to its deadliness. The US Department of Justice opened an investigation into Fulton county’s jail conditions last month.
I walked in at precisely 4pm to find the former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan sitting in a comfortable chair. We made small talk about movies, business, life in suburban Atlanta – anything except the gigantic Technicolor elephant in the 10ft-by-15ft waiting room we were trapped together in. Left unspoken was the obvious consideration about tainting one another’s testimony or potentially displaying bias.
My admiration for him grows the more I think about it, and it has nothing to do with his testimony. Duncan, a Republican, has withdrawn himself from service in elected office like a Knight Templar taking monastic vows and the cassock to contemplate the future of his party. He said he comes from the venture capital world, and views some kinds of chaos as an opportunity. The Republican party is in a state of chaos, but it can reform into something stronger and more stable with deliberate and carefully considered effort. He calls this process GOP 2.0.
If I had been subpoenaed for anything less critical than testimony that potentially affects the state of democracy in America, I would have holed up like Hunter S Thompson on a mountain in Colorado. I have enough problems with people I actually want to talk to calling me a police-ass so-and-so because I write things they don’t like. I left the army in 1999 and swore I wouldn’t ever work for the government again. Journalists are not agents of authority if they are actually doing their job.
And yet, there I sat. And sat. For four and a half hours. The other guy in the room (I won’t name him) had been there since 9am. I tweeted (or whatever we call the hellscape that is Elon Musk’s adopted progeny now) to pass the time. It became apparent that people outside that room knew more about what was happening than we did. Duncan testified, and left.
We were thanked and dismissed at 8.45. The grand jury issued its indictments about 15 minutes later.
My friend the Atlanta writer King Williams says there are no slow news weeks in Georgia. We are targets for grift – which, not coincidentally, is one reason we’re all in court today. No small number of people Fani Willis wants to light on fire were only around to squeeze the last drops of campaign cash out of political outrage. And no small number of media personalities profit from that outrage.
I walked into the jackal scrum waiting in ambush with my arms wide, trying to make myself look bigger to ward off an attack. I failed.
“As far as I know I’m done,” I said. I was asked what would get me back in there. “Another subpoena.” In fact, I’m still on the hook until the end of August under the current subpoenas.
I got on a train home at 10.15pm, counting the minutes it would take for my wife to pick me up at the station, to get to the Mall of Georgia, and make the movie. There were 24 people on that Marta car and if any of them recognized me, they didn’t say so. Atlanta moves in at least two worlds.
I walked into Oppenheimer five minutes after it started.
Halfway into the movie, I thought that this film might be as surreal as my day.
Later I wandered into a Waffle House at 3am. The guy on the grill talked to me about his car breaking down. Ripped the oil pan, he said. Car costs are nuts right now, but he’s making it work. I talked about the movie. I mentioned my day in passing.
“Are you for Trump or against him?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Everything’s still fucked,” I answered.
