(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Democrats may have been feeling the first pangs of buyer’s remorse over their fourth Trump indictment on Thursday, after remembering that Georgia is still, fundamentally, a red state.
Perhaps forgetting the long tradition that journalism has of offering transparency to fight government corruption, NBC News suffered a freakout of epic proportions over an entirely legal editorial decision by ZeroHedge to publish the names of the grand jurors in the Fulton County case against former President Donald Trump and 18 other co-defendants.
In a tweet initially revealing the list, ZeroHedge mused that the incompetent Fulton County Clerk’s office may have made another blunder by forgetting to redact the names on the list.
However, Twitter users quickly added context, explaining that, according to Georgia code, the grand jurors’ names are listed on the indictment “to provide each defendant notice in the event that he/she wants to challenge the indictment process,” as former Fulton County prosecutor Gabe Banks told WABE.
Beyond expediting the legal process, the tranparency simply afforded more accountability—contrary to the secret Star Chamber proceedings that Democrats may prefer.
“We do not live in a society where police and prosecutors get to make unilateral decisions to move forward with charges,” said former DeKalb District Attorney Gwen Keyes Fleming.
“That’s why the grand jury system was set up,” she added. “The system does not work without the participation of ordinary residents of the county.”
In its story highlighting the publication of the names, NBC News not only refused to acknowledge that they were public records, but melodramatically declined to name ZeroHedge as the site that initially published them.
The resulting self-own may perfectly encapsulate the current state of America’s corporate media: “NBC News is choosing not to name the website featuring the addresses to avoid further spreading the information.”
But even while it did not, ostensibly, want the names of the jurors or the offending site to get out, it wanted, nonetheless, to continue peddling outrage over the audacity of ZeroHedge’s action, leading to something of a “Streisand effect,” in which the still public records risked being disseminated even further by those covering the pseudo-scandal.
Indeed, others in the leftist echo chamber were quick to pounce, including former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod, whose old boss has been one of the leading proponents of anti-conservative government censorship.
While denouncing this fictitious jury threat, Axelrod appeared to ignore a separate incident that recently occurred in Portland, Oregon, during the trial of two Antifa members accused of assaulting Post Millennial journalist Andy Ngo.
In closing statements, rather than summarize the salient legal points of the case, Michelle Burrows, an attorney representing the two domestic terrorists, proudly declared to the jury that she, herself, was Antifa and that “she is retiring and will remember all of the faces of the jurors,” Ngo recalled during a recent Fox News interview.
The jurors subsequently wound up aquitting the two Antifa members, despite overwhelming evidence that they were at least complicit in the assault of Ngo—which, under Oregon law, made them culpable.
Following the trial, a Post Millennial reporter who had been covering it returned to find her car had been vandalized.
Meanwhile, in its article about the alleged doxxing of the Fulton County grand-jurors, NBC News also attempted to float a false narrative that portrayed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and other corrupt prosecutors as victims for waging their spurious and unethical lawfare campaign to meddle in the 2024 election.
“Willis faced racist threats ahead of the return of the indictment, and additional security measures were put in place, with some employees being allowed to work from home,” it claimed, citing only the grandstanding prosecutor’s own claims as evidence.
However, Willis also faced the prospect of running cross-ways with the law as state Sen. Colton Moore called on Gov. Brian Kemp to convene a special legislative session to investigate her actions.
“America is under attack,” Moore tweeted. “I’m not going to sit back and watch as radical left prosecutors politically TARGET political opponents.”
It remained to be seen whether Kemp would support the move, as he and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, despite being Republicans, appear both to be in the back-pocket of the globalist subversives at the root of this recent attack on the Constitution.
Following the indictment, the governor doubled down on the demonstrably false claim that Georgia’s 2020 election was totally secure.
But unlike in the immediate aftermath of the election, the upcoming case should, at the very least, grant Trump and his co-defendants the opportunity to present the reams of compelling evidence to the contrary.
And unlike in the irredeemably corrupt D.C. and Manhattan courts—or the one in Portland—MAGA defendants just might get a fair trial in the Peach State.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
