Prosecutors in Atlanta have obtained evidentiary text messages and emails that connect members of Donald Trump’s legal team to a January 2021 Georgia voting system hack.
Over a dozen people will likely face Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s charges. The remote and strongly Republican Coffee County, which Trump carried by over 70% of the vote, has long been suspected by the Georgia criminal investigation as being the area of the breach, but it wasn’t an effort concocted by the local poll workers. There is evidence to imply that Trump’s campaign ordered this effort to get access to the voting software from the top down.
A year ago, investigators began focusing on the breach, and since then, more and more information has surfaced regarding the involvement of Trump’s lawyers and the operatives they hired, as well as how the hack fit into more extensive plans for reversing the election. Text exchanges and other court records reveal that in the days leading up to January 6, 2021, attorneys for Donald Trump and a team of paid operatives attempted to hack into Coffee County’s voting systems.
On January 1, 2021, Trump supporter Katherine Friess, an attorney, invited a group of Trump supporters to Coffee County to investigate the county’s voting procedures. Among them were representatives from Sullivan Strickler, the company Trump’s lawyers had hired to examine the integrity of the voting process in the predominantly Republican Georgia county. Friess invited Bernie Kerik, the former police commissioner of the New York City Police Department and a partner of Giuliani’s, in their search for proof of massive voting fraud. Friess then informed the operatives responsible for the Coffee County breach, and others working directly with Giuliani, that Trump and his team had obtained permission to access the voting machines.
Giuliani and Trump’s staff seem connected to the Coffee County hack via texts and documents that shed light on a new line of contact between pro-Trump lawyers and battleground state operatives who colluded to provide unknown people access to voting machines.
