The U.S. Senate couldn’t simply swear in Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock once their election victories were certified.

First, there was a matter of paperwork.

Officials needed copies of state documents confirming their wins. And they had to be hand-delivered — no simple task, considering a tight timeline and the fortresslike security ringing the U.S. Capitol.

Enter Rhonda Wilson, a longtime key aide in the Georgia governor’s office.

As state elections officials were preparing to finalize the certification on Tuesday, Wilson caught an 8:30 a.m. flight from Atlanta to Washington’s Reagan National Airport.

She clutched an oversized purse with two documents that would ensure the two Democrats could take their oaths of office and cement the transition of power.

One declared Ossoff was elected to a six-year term in the Senate, the other that Warnock won a special election to serve the next two years in the chamber. Both were signed and dated by Gov. Brian Kemp and enclosed in a Manila envelope, a folder and a plastic sheath.

“They were not going to get messed up because of me,” Wilson, a paralegal who has worked in the governor’s office since 2005, said with a chuckle.

Wilson had some experience in the art of ferrying key documents to Washington. After Kemp picked Kelly Loeffler to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat, Wilson hand-delivered the paperwork in 2019 to Capitol officials to clear the way for her swearing-in.

She was an easy pick for other reasons, too. She has established herself as a reliable deputy to a lengthy list of attorneys who advised Sonny Perdue, Nathan Deal and Kemp.

“Rhonda embodies the institution of the governor’s office more than anyone here,” said David Dove, Kemp’s top lawyer. “Rhonda is the living archive of how the office works. She’s a beloved fixture in the office that has helped a generation of executive counsels thrive.”

‘What did she do wrong?’

Still, the Washington she encountered on Tuesday was vastly different from the city she saw on her last mission to the nation’s capital a year before.

The city was encircled by security forces after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a deadly mob bent on preventing Joe Biden from taking office. And the certificates she carried were the focus of national attention since Ossoff and Warnock would seal Democratic control of the Senate the moment they took their oaths.

This time, when Wilson hopped off the Delta Air Lines flight, a Transportation Security Agency official immediately escorted her to a private waiting room not far from her gate.

“My husband asked me if it made me feel important walking alongside the TSA agent,” she said. “I told him no — I felt like everyone was looking at me thinking, what did she do wrong?”

State officials said the documents could be predrafted because they didn’t need to include the vote totals, just the outcome of the races. And if there was a snag in the process, Wilson would have just returned home without handing over the crucial certificates.

That didn’t happen. Moments after the secretary of state’s office certified the results, Wilson called the secretary of the Senate to share the news. A U.S. Capitol Police officer soon raced to the airport to pick up the paperwork and deliver it to U.S. Senate officials.

Wilson never left the airport. Soon, she caught a flight back to Atlanta, landing by 4:30 p.m. A day later, when the two Democrats were sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris, the certificates that Wilson delivered were safely ensconced in the Capitol.

“I was honored to play a very small part in the peaceful transition,” Wilson said. “I don’t think that trip could have been much quicker.”