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From the FAFO files: Georgia pastor facing RICO charges is 'nervous' [1]

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Date: 2023-08-18

Donald Trump has been in the life-ruining business for decades, but he’s really stepped up his game lately. If he’s not canceling gravely ill family members’ health insurance out of spite or watching injured elderly men bleed out in front of him, he’s batting Rudy Giuliani around like a rum-soaked Simon Bar Sinister piñata.

But Lord Fiddle-Pants Magoo isn’t the only forlorn soul in the legal crosshairs thanks to Trump’s (alleged!) extracurricular escapades. Lots of “ordinary” folks have been caught in the dragnet, too. People who, granted, are adults and should know better, but wouldn’t be in anything like the mess they're in if they hadn’t—inexplicably—trusted the pathological liar with the scam university.

One of these folks is Rev. Stephen Lee, and he has victims of his own.

The Daily Beast recently caught up with Lee’s attorney, David Shestokas, who told reporter Justin Rohrlich that Lee is “nervous” after having been indicted in connection with Trump’s wide-ranging conspiracy to steal Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. And since Lee is being charged under the state’s RICO statute, he will serve at least five years in prison if convicted. And Donald Trump can’t pardon him, even if Trump does return to the White House.

That means Lee’s only reward for doing Trump’s bidding is the warm, fuzzy, cult-y feeling one gets from ineptly sabotaging Western democracy on behalf of a semi-ambulant meatloaf.

RELATED STORY: Convergence of conspiracy cases could cleanse nation of Trump cult

The Daily Beast:

Lee, 70, is facing additional counts on top of the RICO charge, including conspiracy to solicit false statements and writings, criminal attempt to influence witnesses, and influencing witnesses. Lee is accused of trying to pressure a temporary election worker, Ruby Freeman, to confess to a slew of bogus assertions by Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and other MAGA-world luminaries, that Freeman and her daughter, who are Black, surreptitiously introduced suitcases stuffed with thousands of fake ballots into the counting process to help Joe Biden. Trump referenced Freeman over and over during his infamous Jan. 2, 2021 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, in which he exhorted Raffensperger to “find” enough local votes to undo Biden’s win. Freeman was “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” Trump lied, calling the 60-something Freeman a “known political operative.”

In other words, Trump was perfectly willing to destroy an innocent stranger’s life in order to illegitimately hang onto power—and he decided endangering his goofball allies’ livelihoods and freedom was the way to do it. (Allegedly!)

“I can tell you that [Lee is] nervous,” Shestokas told The Daily Beast. “Anybody charged with a crime that serious—a five-year mandatory minimum, and a possible 20-year maximum—is not going to sleep easy at night, regardless of whatever comfort and counseling I’m able to offer. But even under those circumstances, I certainly have no guarantees for him.”

Well, Shestokas can certainly guarantee that minimum sentence for the RICO charge! And he can also guarantee that Lee would have been better off if he hadn’t given his life over to serving Donald Trump, but that’s true of nearly everyone, whether they realize it yet or not. After all, most of Trump’s followers would fall for the Nigerian prince scam a second time if the spammers simply changed the name of the country to Niger.

That said, Lee is ultimately responsible for his own fate, and he hardly appears innocent in all this. He may be unable “to sleep easy,” but he’s tossing and turning in a bed he made. (Allegedly!)

According to prosecutors, Lee worked with co-defendants Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti on a pressure campaign to convince Freeman, the poll worker, to corroborate Trump’s sad and lonely fever dreams.

Lee reportedly visited Freeman’s home on Dec. 15, 2020. After she refused to talk to him, Lee contacted Floyd, who heads up Black Voices for Trump in the Chicago area, and asked him to intervene because Floyd, like Freeman, was Black, and Lee thought Freeman wouldn’t speak to him because he was white. Floyd then asked Kutti, a Black celebrity publicist who’s represented model citizens R. Kelly and the Ye previously known as Kanye West, to travel to Freeman’s home to try her luck. (Allegedly!)

The Daily Beast:

There, Kutti, who is herself indicted on the same charges as Floyd, introduced herself to Freeman without providing much further detail about who sent her. All Kutti would say was that she was there on behalf of a “high-profile individual,” and floated a dubious offer of immunity from prosecution if Freeman would admit to voter fraud. If she didn’t, Freeman would be thrown in jail, Kutti allegedly said. (Floyd told Reuters later that month that he sent Kutti in his stead because he was busy, declining to identify Lee beyond a vague reference to a chaplain with “connections” to law enforcement.)

In other words, Trump’s minions appear to have been engaged in a concerted pressure campaign to convince Freeman to lie in order to create a pretense to overturn Georgia’s legitimate election results.

In addition to these house calls, Trump was also name-checking Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a full-time Georgia elections worker, in his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, baselessly accusing them of helping to steal the election in Georgia. And Giuliani was using shameful racist dog whistles to bring the already fraught situation to a boiling point.

The New Republic:

[V]arious Trump lawyers, including Giuliani, talked [footage of Freeman and Moss counting ballots] up at Georgia Senate hearings, Giuliani saying Freeman and Moss were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”; Giuliani flagged it on Twitter (he’s since conceded, in a defamation suit brought by Moss and Freeman, that his allegations were “actionable” and “false”); Sean Hannity picked it up; and on January 2—weeks after the rumor had been disproven in multiplenews outlets and investigated and found false by Trump’s own Justice department—Trump babbled to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about “what looked to be suitcases or trunks” that were “stuffed with votes” and contained, “the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.” Trump mentioned Freeman by name 18 times, calling her “a professional vote scammer.” “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Freeman told the January 6 committee. “The president of the United States made up lies about two ordinary Americans for his own personal gain.”

Freeman was so frightened by the attention that she was forced to go into hiding.

Reuters:

Moss’s full-time job pays about $36,000 a year. Freeman’s temp gig paid $16 an hour. Their modest incomes left the two women with little power to defend themselves against the billionaire president and his legions of backers. After Freeman went into hiding, she initially stayed with friends. They soon asked her to leave, fearing for their own security, so she moved from one Airbnb to another, never staying in one place for too long, said a person with direct knowledge of her movements. Freeman went to great lengths to conceal her identity and location, the person said. She stopped using credit cards and started using a system for electronic money transfers that caters to people wanting to keep a low profile, the person said. The constant threats so terrified the two women that they did not return calls from Fulton County District Attorney’s Office investigators who wanted to talk to them this summer as part of their probe into whether Trump illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election, [Fulton County Elections Director Richard] Barron said. “They wouldn’t even answer the phone,” he said.

So, yes, what Lee stands accused of are hardly victimless crimes.

RELATED STORY: The threats of violence against Trump judge and grand jurors in Georgia have begun

For his part, Shestokas appears convinced—or perhaps desperate to convince the media—that his client is a good guy who doesn’t personally know Trump or Giuliani. At the same time, Lee appears unwilling to cooperate with prosecutors.

“There is nothing in terms of cooperation,” Shestokas said. “What is there? You know, what’s there to cooperate with?”

Well, let the good pastor fuck around some more and find out further. Or he could do the smart thing for once and flip on the one guy on the planet who’d turn on literally anyone to save his skin.

RELATED STORY: Trump can believe whatever he wants, but that doesn’t mean he’s any less guilty

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

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