Free the Cobb County 3: Georgia Attorney General Launches Yet Another Bogus Attack on Cop City Defendants

Four months after the Cop City RICO was dismissed in Fulton County, Georgia, on Thursday, April 23, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr announced that a Cobb County grand jury indicted three of the 61 Cop City defendants on new charges.

Hannah Kass, Katie Kloth, and Tyler Norman are charged with two counts of felony destruction of property and one count of felony arson to lands just outside of Atlanta. These stale charges are related to a protest that occurred outside of Brassfield & Gorrie, the contractor that built Cop City, in May of 2022. The timing of the indictment came just three weeks before the statute of limitations would block Georgia's ability to begin a prosecution. It is also just one month before the primary election in which Carr is running for Governor of Georgia, in a race he is losing.

Questionably, the Cobb County indictment is for the exact same allegations that the three defendants faced in the Fulton County RICO that was dismissed in December - allegations that are extreme and an attack on First Amendment activity. As in many other Georgia counties, the Attorney General has come back for yet another bite at the apple to try to prosecute demonstrators who opposed the construction of Cop City.

However, the language used by the Attorney General to describe the 2022 protest against the construction company has notably changed from the Fulton indictment. In a clearly politicized move, the highest prosecutor in Georgia now repeats language used by the federal government in the prosecution of the Prairieland Defendants in the North District of Texas. Whereas Carr referred to anarchist ideologies and a non-existent criminal enterprise in his 2023 Fulton RICO indictment, in his 2026 Cobb County press conference, he framed the defendants as members of "Antifa" - a boogeyman fabricated by the far right for years.

We are witnessing a coordinated attack on our social movements by both the state and federal governments. After previous charges against protesters failed to stick, Trump's NSMP-7 directive gives government actors a new, dangerous weapon against the right to protest.

NLG demands that all Cop City charges be dropped and calls for solidarity with the Cobb County 3, the latest victims in Georgia's political theater.