Damning emails and text messages connecting Trump’s legal team with a January 2021 voting system breach in Georgia have been discovered by Atlanta-area prosecutors, according to a bombshell CNN report published on Sunday.
The revelation comes as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to file indictments against former President Donald Trump and his allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which would bring the number of criminal indictments faced by the former president and current GOP frontrunner to four.
At the center of the scheme in Coffee County, a rural area where Trump carried 70% of the vote, is a local elections official named Misty Hampton, who claimed in a November 2020 elections board meeting that the state’s new Dominion-made voting machines could “very easily” be manipulated. That comment immediately piqued the interest of the Trump campaign, which asked Hampton for “as much information as possible.”
The November elections board meeting “set off an extraordinary sequence of events that plunged the GOP enclave into the middle of a multistate effort by prominent Trump allies to gain access to voting machines in search of purported evidence that the election was rigged,” The Washington Post reported last year. Those events culminated on January 7, when local election officials and GOP allies let pro-Trump operatives into the Coffee County elections office, where they “imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment.”
But the extent of Trump lawyers’ involvement in the scheme has previously been unreported.
A key moment came on New Year’s Day, when a lawyer working with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and other Trump allies shared a “written invitation” provided by Hampton that purportedly gave them permission to examine the county’s voting systems. The lawyer also provided what she called the “Letter of invitation to Coffee County, Georgia” to Bernie Kerik, a former NYPD commissioner who was working with Giuliani to try to find evidence of voter fraud.
Previous reporting has linked the breach to Powell, but this latest revelation appears to tie Giuliani much more directly to the scheme. “Rudy Giuliani had nothing to do with this,” his attorney Robert Costello told CNN. “You can’t attach Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell’s crackpot idea.” CNN’s investigation cites text messages that contradict this defense. “Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!” an employee from Sullivan Strickler, a law firm hired by Powell to scrutinize Coffee County’s voting system, wrote in a group chat on January 1. (Messages in the group consistently referred to Giuliani as “the Mayor”.) “Most immediately, we were just granted access – by written invitation! – to Coffee County’s systems. Yay!” the text continued.
Trump himself was likely aware of at least some of what was going on in Coffee County. During a now-infamous December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, Trump was presented with a draft executive order to seize voting machines that explicitly cited Coffee County. In the meeting, Giuliani referenced a scheme to acquire “voluntary access” to Georgia voting systems.