One of the main pieces of evidence that was used against former President Donald Trump in his most recent indictment in Georgia was a series of emails and text messages that prosecutors in Fulton County got possession of.
Those communications directly connected members of the legal team representing Trump to the breach in the voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia, that happened in January of 2021.
Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, announced on Monday an indictment of Trump and 18 of his allies in regard to efforts to overturn the election loss in the state during the 2020 presidential election. In doing so, she accused the group of running a “criminal enterprise” that sought to keep Trump in the White House.
Investigators who have been working on Willis’ team have suspected for a while now that the breach in Coffee County wasn’t an organic effort that came from voters who were sympathetic to Trump. During their investigation, they say they uncovered information that showed Trump’s team worked on the breach from the top-down, allowing them to access sensitive voting software.
Willis’ investigators also said that allies of Trump and his team tried to access those voting systems following the 2020 presidential election, seeking to gain evidence that could support Trump’s claims that there was voter fraud in Georgia.
The investigation into Trump in Georgia began because of a recorded call that Trump made to Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, asking him to find the necessary votes to change the results so that Trump would win Georgia instead of Democrat Joe Biden.
As the investigation progressed, though, the voting breach emerged as one of the main areas of focus for the investigators. People who are close to the situation told CNN that it became a focus of the investigation about a year ago.
In the time since, the investigators were able to slowly uncover information about the role that Trump’s attorneys played in the situation, as well as the various operatives that they hired to work on their behalf. They also looked into how the voting breach itself – and some others that happened in a few of the other key battleground states during the 2020 election – factored into the bigger plans Trump’s team had for trying to overturn the results of the election.
In court documents, the prosecutors alleged that the text messages show that the lawyers who were representing Trump hired operatives to try to access the voting systems in Coffee County in the days that led up to January 6 of 2021. It was all part of the team’s plan to gather as much evidence as they could to present to the American public – and members of Congress – before Congress certified the results of the Electoral College on January 6.
Just last year, a former official in the Trump administration testified to the House’s January 6 select committee that plans to try to access some of Georgia’s voting systems were discussed during meetings that took place at the White House.
