A judge in Arizona’s fake electors case has put new rules in place to protect the identities of the grand jurors who indicted the defendants in the case.
Last week, prosecutors with the Arizona Attorney General’s Office asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen to order that grand jurors’ names be redacted in transcripts that detail their deliberations prior to indicting 18 individuals in the fake elector case, who are accused of conspiring to undermine President Joe Biden’s electoral victory in Arizona in 2020.
At a hearing last week, Assistant Attorney General Krista Wood said the leak of grand jury documents to the press earlier this year along with the potential for future leaks due to the sheer number of defendants in the case justified additional security measures, citing alleged harassment faced by grand jurors in a similar case in Georgia.
“This is an issue that many people feel strongly about and has resulted in many types of harassing information as outlined in our indictment, and as has been reported in our motions, specifically to the Georgia grand jurors,” Wood said.
Cohen ordered the transcripts to be sealed — or made not accessible to the public — and redacted on July 5, but some defense attorneys had already obtained unredacted versions by that time.
Defense attorneys balked at some of Wood’s requests and denied that they had anything to do with those earlier leaks to the media.
“If you look at the information that was in the leaks, those leaks were clearly disclosed by the state or by the grand jurors themselves,” said Anne Chapman, an attorney for Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff. “It was information not known to the defendants.”
Days later, however, an attorney for defendant Christina Bobb inadvertently included the names of several grand jurors in a public court filing that included partial transcripts. After prosecutors made Cohen aware of that disclosure, he sealed the filing, which included seven grand jurors’ names.
In an Aug. 29 order, Cohen ordered defense attorneys to “employ best efforts to regain possession of all unredacted transcripts” they provided to defendants or “non-attorneys” working on the case.
“This matter is extremely high profile, with public interest spanning the country,” Cohen wrote in the order. “Allowing the dissemination of identifying information can be detrimental to the privacy and safety rights of those who served on the Grand Jury.”
Cohen ordered prosecutors to create new copies of the transcripts for the defense that have the grand juror names redacted.
