Special grand jury foreperson shares details, drops heavy hints in Georgia Trump case

We are starting in the state of Georgia. Fulton County District Attorney Fawney Willis has yet to say whether or not she will seek indictments in her sprawling criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump and his allies' efforts to subvert the 2020 election. But today one of the grand jurors in that, Emily Coors, the jury's forewoman, she is speaking out. NBC News Blaine Alexander sat down with Coors earlier this afternoon for her first television interview, and she dropped a whole lot of hints. Did the grand jury recommend indictments of multiple people? Yes. I will tell you, it's not a short list. I mean, we saw 75 people, and there are six pages of the report cut out.

So we're talking about more than a dozen people? I would say that. Yes. Are these recognizable names, names that people would know? There are certainly names that you would recognize. Yes. There definitely are some names that you expect. The grand jury forewoman telling NBC Today that the Georgia panel recommended that over a dozen people be indicted. Dozen is a lot.

And on the one question that we are all wondering about, did the special grand jury recommend an indictment against the former president? Take a listen. Did the grand jury recommend an indictment of former President Trump? I'm not going to speak on exact indictments. Would we be surprised? Are there bombshells of who is being indicted? I don't think that there are any giant plot twists coming. I don't think that there are any giant, that's not the way I expected this to go at all. I don't think that's in store for anyone. So nothing that would surprise people who have been following this? Probably not. I wouldn't want to characterize anyone else's reaction, of course, but so that was when we heard a lot in testimony.

But probably not. It probably wouldn't shock you. I would not expect you to be too shocked. And that includes the former president? Potentially. Potentially. It might. It's hard to parse that one out.

Again, on the subject of a potential Trump indictment, Cores was asked today, this time by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, about Trump's claim that the grand jury's report totally exonerated him. In response, Cores rolled her eyes and burst out laughing. Did he really say that? She asked. Oh, that's fantastic. That's phenomenal. I love it. So make of that what you will.

We also learned in Cores' NBC News interview that Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, did in fact testify to the special grand jury for an hour and a half. This is information we did not know previously. Cores further revealed that many witnesses who came to testify before the grand jury did so having already been granted immunity. How many people came into the room to testify with immunity deals already in place? Maybe it doesn't. In a series of interviews today, Cores also told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that the panel heard more recordings of Trump phone calls. That is in addition to his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger asking him to, quote, find 11,000 votes. This is what Cores said about those calls.

We heard a lot of recordings of President Trump on the phone declining to give specifics. It is amazing how many hours of footage you can find of that man on the phone. Some of these that were privately recorded by people were recorded by a staffer. Now this is a person who volunteered to be the forewoman of the special grand jury but did not vote in 2016. She did not vote in 2020. In fact, she told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that she has never voted before, period. And until the grand jury proceedings, Cores had never heard the infamous call between Donald Trump and Brad Raffensberger.

So getting inside her head to try and understand what she means by things like, I would not expect you to be too shocked when it comes to the indictments or what might be a giant plot twist in this person's mind or what might not be that is all very complicated. Because in addition to all the things I just recapped, Emily Cores also said things like this. My coolest moment was shaking Rudy Giuliani's hand. That was really cool for me. I made a point of stopping them and being like, wait, before we go back to this, can I shake your hand? Because it's an honor to meet the guy. It was really neat for me. OK.

What we have in these interviews is a window into the thought process of a special grand jury that heard evidence in perhaps the most legally perilous investigation of a former president in American history. A special grand jury led by someone who has never before participated in the most basic part of our democracy voting. Someone who during proceedings drew sketches of witnesses like Senator Lindsey Graham and former Trump aide Mark Short and who swore in at least, who swore in at least one witness, I am not kidding here, holding a teenage mutant Ninja Turtles popsicle stick. It is worth mentioning that this wasn't just a jury. This wasn't just a grand jury. This was a special grand jury that was convened in large part to give the district attorney down in Fulton County the sort of political cover necessary to go forward with potentially one of the most explosive indictments in American history.

Alex Wagner