Fulton DA media strategist says office once paid Critical Mention contracts, cites large "earned media" figures

Jeff DeSantis, a deputy district attorney who described his role as media relations and strategy for the Fulton County District Attorney's Office, testified before the Georgia Senate Special Committee on Investigations that his office contracted a media‑monitoring service (Critical Mention) for two approximately $10,000 annual agreements soon after DA Fani Willis took office and that he later chose not to renew the service.

DeSantis said the monitoring was intended to help the office "know what our jurors are reading" and to correct inaccuracies in press coverage. "I was not instructed to put that together by anybody … I did it," he told the committee, describing a PowerPoint and search results he produced showing what the service labeled "earned media value." He later pointed to slide figures the committee displayed: a single‑week spike the report flagged at about $150,000,000 and a term total on another slide shown as roughly $637,000,000, which he and others said were analytics outputs and not a direct cash transfer.

The presentation and follow‑up questioning centered on whether the monitoring product’s reported "value" meaningfully informed prosecutorial decisions or otherwise created a perception problem. DeSantis said the numerical "value" was a feature of the subscription interface and, in his view, not a precise financial measure. "It was sort of a way to get, kind of, get, like, relative compared to other things," he said. He also told the committee he negotiated a lower rate for the contract and that there were two annual contracts in the early period after the new administration took office.

Committee members pressed about when the office used the service, what replaced it and why it was discontinued. DeSantis testified he negotiated the first contract in early 2021 and that he later decided not to seek renewal; he said he regretted that the office lacked a current equivalent and that manual monitoring had continued.

The session included procedural objections over the subcommittee’s quorum and the scope of questions tied to an ongoing investigation; committee counsel and other members debated whether the subcommittee could take testimony for information‑gathering without a full committee vote. No formal policy or funding vote was taken at the hearing. The committee approved the meeting minutes at the start of the session by voice vote and recessed for lunch before the next witness was called.

The committee accepted DeSantis’s exhibit list for the record and the chair directed staff to include his uploaded materials in the hearing packet. The committee did not make any formal findings during DeSantis’s testimony and held further questioning for later in the day.