(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
New video shows just how deeply Trump team infiltrated Georgia's election system after the election [1]
['Daily Kos Staff', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-09-20
We know from subpoenaed information, reported here by Rebekah Sager, that the team had “gained access to voting machines in Georgia and then made copies of reams of the sensitive election documents they found.” With this new video, we have a sense of both the scope and the sensitivity of the materials they obtained.
The secretary of state’s office downplays the sensitivity of the information on potentially every registered Georgia voter included on the poll pads. A spokesman for the office said that the poll pads “have voter information but it’s not accessible because it’s scrambled behind security protocols,” and that Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers were not on the poll pads “at the time.” Small comfort given the amount of information the Trump group probably obtained and the fact that hackers could be at work unscrambling it.
Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who was in the group that infiltrated the Coffee County elections office, said “we scanned every freaking ballot” in a recorded phone call previous released in the case. On the call, Hall said that they had “scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot,” with the blessing of the local elections board.
Maybe not just the locals: The videos also feature investigators from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office hanging around with the Trumpers “investigating” something, which is questionable now that Raffensperger’s office is also involved in investigating what exactly the Trump team was doing in Coffee County that day. The secretary of state’s office has “no idea” why its investigators were there, the same spokesman tells the Times, although he said that at the time of the office breach, the secretary of state’s office was examining “vote-counting procedures when Coffee County was unable to certify the results of their election by the time of the deadline.”
“We are looking into it,” he said about the presence of the state investigators. “Again, we take this very seriously. This investigation is a joint effort between the secretary of state’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and if it’s determined that people have committed a crime, they’re going to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
There’s also the little problem for that Republican Party official, Latham, that smacks of perjury. Last month, she testified under oath that she really wasn’t involved in any of this, that she just happened to be at the office in Coffee County that day, and only went as far as the front desk where she spoke with an elections official about something else entirely.
“I didn’t go into the office,” Latham said, The Washington Post reports based on a transcript of her deposition filed in court. She saw a pro-Trump businessman she knew who was working with the Powell group, she said, and they chatted for “five minutes at most” before she left to have an early dinner with her husband.
Or ... not. This new video places her at the elections office two times that day for a total of four hours. She did greet the businessman—Hall—but she also accompanied him into the back of the building where they met other local election officials and the SullivanStrickler experts. The video also shows, the Post reports, that over the course of the day “she moved in and out of an area where the experts from the data forensics firm, SullivanStrickler, were working, a part of that building that was not visible to the surveillance camera.” Oh, and, “She took a selfie with one of the forensics experts before heading out at 6:19 p.m.”
Latham’s lawyers insist in a comment to the Post that she was not committing perjury in her deposition. “Failing to accurately remember the details of events from almost two years ago is not lying,” they said. They also insist she was not involved in any of the copying of data and systems and that she did nothing improper or illegal. Never mind that she signed a fake certification as a fake elector for Trump. Or that SullivanStrickler’s lawyers put Latham in the middle of the whole project, saying she was “a primary point of contact in coordinating and facilitating” the work, and that she “was on-site in the Coffee County elections office that day while the work was performed.” In a deposition, a company executive said that “Cathy Latham also provided direction on what was required for collection.”
As Mark Sumner noted in his reporting on the initial video release of the incident, the “software copied by Lemberg and Logan could be extremely valuable to hackers seeking to actually control and alter the results of voting. That’s even more critical with the release of the new video showing that they had the poll pads, and potentially personal data for every Georgia voter.”
Trump and his followers proved on Jan. 6 how dangerously close they came to overturning our democracy. Help cancel Republican voter suppression with the power of your pen by clicking here and signing up to volunteer with Vote Forward, writing personalized letters to targeted voters urging them to exercise their right to vote this year.
RELATED STORIES:
New subpoena from Georgia Bureau of Investigations reveals Trump team made copies of voting files
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/20/2124045/-New-video-shows-just-how-deeply-Trump-team-infiltrated-Georgia-s-election-system-after-the-election
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
