Former President Donald Trump was charged this week in connection with his role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election and events leading up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. A grand jury indicted him on four counts, including conspiracy to defraud the nation.
The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. It marks the third criminal indictment against Trump. The first was in New York in a case involving a hush-money payment to an adult film star during his 2016 campaign. Then, in June, he was indicted in Miami on federal charges of mishandling classified documents at his Florida estate.
Tuesday’s actions are not the last of the former president’s legal troubles. Last week, orange security barricades went up outside the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta. The widely reported security measure was a sign of an expected indictment in the investigation into Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
“The work is accomplished,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told local TV station 11Alive of potential charges in the high-profile case. “We’ve been working for two-and-a-half years. We’re ready to go.”
With possible charges looming, Georgia will soon return to the national spotlight. And on the ground are local reporters who have been reporting on this years-long investigation at nearly every stage. Two local journalists spoke with Poynter about how they’ve been preparing for an indictment and how they view their roles as Georgia-based reporters as different from journalists who work for national outlets.
“In some ways, I’ve been building towards this most of my reporting career, but in other ways, nobody anticipates it going quite like this,” said Stephen Fowler, a political reporter who for several years has been covering voting in the state for Georgia Public Broadcasting.
Fowler remembers first looking into voting in Georgia in 2018. “I went down this rabbit hole of how voting works and doesn’t work in Georgia, well before there was any rumblings of attempts to challenge absentee ballots and undermine the credibility of the election and, ultimately, pressure officials to subvert the results,” he said. Now he can argue that the Fulton County investigation and possible indictment is the biggest story he’s had to cover so far. “I think most people would say so,” he added.
For Tamar Hallerman, a senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covering the Fulton County investigation into whether Trump or his allies criminally interfered in Georgia’s 2020 elections is now her full-time beat. It wasn’t always like that. First hired as the newspaper’s Washington correspondent, Hallerman moved to Atlanta in 2019 and shifted her focus to mainly writing features and enterprise stories.
When the then-new District Attorney Willis announced in 2021 that she was looking into Trump’s actions, Hallerman was assigned to help her then-colleague, Christian Boone, with a profile on Willis.
“It started from there,” she said. “I just found the investigation kind of interesting.”
As Hallerman began covering developments in the investigation, “things started to heat up,” she said. Willis requested a special grand jury to aid in her investigation. That was when it occurred to Hallerman that this was going to be “way bigger than just the occasional assignment.”
“There’s been so many twists and turns in this story. Every time I think I know what’s going to happen, it changes,” Hallerman said. “There’s been some incredible moments, especially in the courtroom. There’s been some really shocking things in court filings. There’s been all sorts of characters who have entered the story, so to speak. … It’s been the ride of a lifetime. It’s been nonstop. It’s been challenging. It’s been so interesting. And there’s never a shortage of things to write.”
To cover the investigation, Hallerman has relied on her background in covering politics and the time she spent chronicling Trump while he was in Washington. Hallerman said she’s very familiar with the many state-level players who have served as witnesses, and that it helps to have colleagues with different strengths. For example, there’s Bill Rankin, who has been AJC’s legal affairs reporter for decades. Hallerman has joined Rankin to co-host the ninth season of the newspaper’s “Breakdown” podcast. This season is all about the grand jury investigation of Trump.
“He understands the courts like no one else, and he brings just such a deep knowledge of the law, the process, and he seems to know everyone in town – so many judges, pretty much every defense lawyer,” Hallerman said of Rankin. “And so every time I’ve been overwhelmed, it’s been really great to be able to look at my colleague and talk things through.”
Hallerman, who reports mostly from home, said she makes a giant vat of coffee from her boyfriend’s Bunn coffee maker before each workday. “That usually sustains me through about two o’clock,” she said. Hallerman and her boyfriend also share two dogs, so when she needs a break or feels overwhelmed, she takes their pitbull mix and boxer mix out for a walk. She said it really helps to clear her head.
Asked how she reports and writes for a local and state audience in a way that is different from national outlets, Hallerman said it’s good to know local folks on the ground. “Maybe if the DA isn’t willing to talk about an issue – sometimes it’s in their interest to not talk to the press about something – I know former prosecutors locally on the ground here who maybe retired a few years ago, but who can really provide insight,” she said. “We know the defense attorneys who are well known locally, but who aren’t national names, who maybe have worked with the DA or can provide context about previous cases in Georgia that can speak to what’s going on in this particular case.”
GPB’s Fowler said that what’s important and relevant for him may be different from another journalist serving a national audience. “And that’s not to take away from those people and outlets that have those missions,” Fowler said. “But I’m able to go deeper and have more context and have more relevance to what’s actually going on, because this is my backyard.”
Fowler, who joined GPB in 2016, said this is a story that he’s lived with since before the 2020 election. “Once the indictments are done, and people are arraigned, and there’s a trial or there’s not a trial, I’m still here,” he said. “I’m reporting on those stories while some of these other national outlets have moved on to the next shiny thing.”
Earlier this year, Fowler and his wife welcomed the birth of their first child. When he spoke with Poynter this week, he was in the process of coming out of parental leave.
“It has been a bit of a challenge because I’ve been trying to fully engage with being on leave and having a newborn, but then there’s the steady drumbeat in the background of the impending announcements,” Fowler said.
Part of his work is serving as host of the “Battleground: Ballot Box” podcast, in which Fowler covers Georgia’s election laws, campaigns and voting. Georgia Public Broadcasting has been working on a special, limited run of his podcast, with episodes coming out before the expected decisions that will remind listeners of key players and key events during the course of the investigation.
“That first episode will drop on Monday, the 7th, so I should probably be around to make sure that it’s officially put out,” he said.
While on leave, Fowler said he’s been largely offline.
“But it’s really the story of the century, and all of the developments have been impossible to ignore.”
