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Missed News: "Pastor Indicted With Trump in Georgia Asks Evangelical Supporters for Help" [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-08

I was looking up any news on some of the players in the GA RICO case to overtun the GA election results, and I found some further information on one of the most despicable characters IMHO — Pastor Stephen C. Lee of IL. Pastor Lee was instrumental in making GA election worker Ruby Freeman’s life hell. Lee was harassing Freeman to lie about her actions during the 2020 Election, and he managed to bring in two other despicable assholes — Harrison Floyd and Trevian Kutti — who threatened Freeman with jail if she didn’t admit to messing with voting ballots. Turns out the Pastor Lee is hitting up evangelicals for financial support, and his message is that he is being persecuted for his religious faith and works.

Yeah, right.

So let’s start with his lies and BS that he is selling to his fellow religious fanatics:

The Rev. Stephen C. Lee is one of the lesser-known figures indicted with former President Donald J. Trump in Fulton County, Ga., on charges of unlawfully conspiring to keep Mr. Trump in power after the 2020 election. But on Thursday night at an evangelical church near Chicago, dozens of people held their arms aloft and prayed over Pastor Lee at a fund-raiser where he was portrayed as an American hero — and a victim of religious persecution. “We’re going to be talking about the weaponization of government against religion,” Gary S. Franchi, Jr., a host on a conservative online news channel, declared from the pulpit at Families of Faith Ministries in Channahon, Ill., at the start of the event. “We’re going to be supporting ‘America’s chaplain,’ and religious liberty, here tonight.” Pastor Lee, 71, is a former law enforcement officer who became a Lutheran minister and currently leads a small church in Orland Park, Ill. He says he has offered spiritual support to police officers and victims after some of the worst American tragedies of the last quarter-century, including the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and the Sept. 11 attack in New York. His lawyer, David Shestokas, has argued that Pastor Lee was doing something similar — engaging in “pastoral activities” — when he showed up in Georgia after the 2020 election.

Uh huh. The guy went from IL to GA and tried to meet with Freeman, who by this time was dealing with racist taunts and death threats because Trump and Giuliani said she and her daughter were primarily responsible for messing with voting ballots. There was supposedly some smoking gun video of Freeman’s actions during the counting of votes. This was a blatant lie.

If you had been bombarded with messages calling you every name under the Sun and threatening to kill you, would you answer the door to a stranger who is knocking on your door? According to Lee he just felt the need to give Freeman help, so he traveled from IL to GA to help someone he had no connection to. And what kind of help was he trying to offer?

Neither he nor his lawyer has spoken at length about why he decided to travel to Georgia in December 2020. In an interview earlier this year, Mr. Shestokas said that his client did so “on his own,” and that he had not coordinated with other high-profile co-defendants like Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, or Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former Trump lawyer who amplified the false claims about Ms. Freeman. “His presence in Georgia had to do with the kind of guy he is in terms of his history, and trying to be involved in situations where America’s in crisis and he thinks he can help,” Mr. Shestokas said of his client in the interview. Ms. Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Moss, were part of a team processing votes for the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections on election night. Soon after, video footage of the pair handling ballots was posted online and shared widely among Trump supporters, who claimed falsely that it showed the two women recording bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor. In defamation lawsuits against some of their accusers, the women, who are Black, said they were subjected to “an onslaught of violent, racist threats and harassment of all kinds.” Ms. Freeman was forced to move out of her house for weeks. On Dec. 15, 2020, a police officer wearing a body camera recorded video of Pastor Lee in his clerical collar, sitting in a car parked near Ms. Freeman’s suburban home. The video demonstrates that the officer was on the scene because Ms. Freeman called the police after Pastor Lee knocked on her door and then lingered nearby. In the video, Pastor Lee chats amiably with the officer. “I’m a pastor, and I’m also with some folks who are trying to help Ruby out, OK?” he said. “And also get some truth of what’s going on.”

What fucking truth? Freeman did nothing wrong. But here was this stranger hanging out in his car after she refused to open the door. And she felt enough fear to call a cop.

Did I mention that Pastor Lee was a former cop? Wouldn’t you think that a former cop would know that his presence just MIGHT be seen as a bit of a threat? This is why everything that Lee says is a fucking lie. Lee knows better, and he let his real intentions come out during this interview.

In recent weeks, Pastor Lee’s version of what he was doing in Georgia after the election has been gaining purchase in the Illinois evangelical community, as he and Mr. Shestokas have done numerous interviews with right-wing media outlets. Thursday’s event drew roughly 200 people. Mr. Franchi, the M.C., said falsely that the 2020 election “was stolen right out from under every single American.” The gulf between the two narratives of Pastor Lee’s time in Georgia says much about a country fraying along political and cultural battle lines as Mr. Trump, the most prominent of the Georgia criminal defendants, ramps up his campaign for a second term and continues to push the false narrative that the previous election was rigged. Pastor Lee, in a 2021 speech endorsing a pro-Trump candidate for Congress named Jim Marder, said that he had largely refrained from getting involved in politics for much of his career. But more recently, he said at the time, something had changed: “We’re facing the extinction of America.”

Emphasis is mine.

Lee realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere with Freeman because he is white, so he made a phone call back to Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump to help him out. Floyd got a hold of Trevian Kutti, who was a former publicist for Kanye West, and both descended upon Freeman.

In a phone interview Monday, Floyd said he was asked if he’d be willing to set up the meeting by a man he described as a chaplain with “connections” in federal law enforcement. He declined to name the clergyman or to detail what those connections involved. Floyd said the chaplain, who is white, wanted him to approach Freeman, who is Black, to discuss an immunity deal for her, out of a belief that she would not trust a white stranger. Floyd, Douglas and Kutti are Black. Floyd said that he had left his role in the Trump campaign before the Jan. 4 meeting. Trump himself “never asked me to go” to Georgia, he said, and board members of the Black Voices for Trump group “had no involvement in this.” Floyd said he arranged the meeting in an effort to help Freeman. He said he himself believed she was seeking assistance, including immunity from prosecution over claims from the Trump camp that she had committed voting fraud. Freeman, through a spokesperson, said she never reached out to anyone to seek immunity. Her lawyer, Von DuBose, declined to comment further. A former Justice Department official in Georgia confirmed that state and federal investigators concluded in December 2020 that there was no evidence Freeman committed fraud. As a result, the department never considered offering her immunity, said the official, who had direct knowledge of a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Trump’s Georgia election-fraud claims. Floyd did not directly answer when asked whether Freeman requested immunity at the meeting. He said Freeman wasn’t willing to “put anything down on paper,” so he had nothing to “run up the flagpole,” referring to his more senior contacts in Trump’s political operation. Asked if he told Freeman that he was a Trump campaign official, Floyd said: “I’m pretty certain that I made it clear.” He referred to a comment by Kutti, captured on police bodycam video, telling Freeman that “federal people” were involved in offering her help. “Who was the current president at that time? President Trump,” said Floyd. “If she’s there saying, I’m here to connect you with federal people, well, that’s people in the Trump administration.” Freeman told Reuters in a previous interview that she did not know Kutti was a Trump supporter until after the meeting at the police station, when Freeman researched the publicist online.

So Lee, Floyd, and Kutti are pushing Freeman to admit to crimes she never committed, and Freeman had better take “the immunity deal” or else.

So much for spiritual help from “Pastor” Lee.

Now, you might be wondering, why doesn't Lee cut his own plea deal with Fanni Willis? He may have been offered a plea deal, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say he has/will refuse. Why?

The indictment of Mr. Trump and 18 others on Aug. 14, and statements from Ms. Freeman, tell a different story. They place Pastor Lee at the center of efforts to pressure Ms. Freeman into falsely admitting to election fraud, raising questions about why a Midwestern clergyman was so determined to make contact with an Atlanta elections worker. Pastor Lee has been indicted on five felony charges, including violating Georgia’s racketeering law, and has pleaded not guilty. In his presentation on Thursday night, he noted that he could face up to 20 years in prison for the racketeering charge alone. “That’s a death sentence,” he said.

Lee wants no time in prison. And he is both a political extremist and religious fanatic. My guess is that Lee will roll the dice with “God on his side” rather than face prison. Also, former cops do not exactly do well in prison.

You are an old mofo Lee, and you as a former cop knew better than to harass and threaten someone into making a false confession. You have no excuse, so I think it is a safe bet that you will fall back on God to save your ass. You will serve time in prison, and if you die in prison, so be it.

NOTE: Yes, I took more than I should from the NYT for Fair Use. But it is not like most of us can link to the article, and I thought it was too important an issue to not quote directly.

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[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/8/2210374/-Missed-News-Pastor-Indicted-With-Trump-in-Georgia-Asks-Evangelical-Supporters-for-Help?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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