Text messages and other communications obtained by Georgia prosecutors investigating Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results purportedly connect members of the former president's legal team with a January 2021 voting-systems breach, according to a new report.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis's office has reviewed the communications and is expected to present her case before the grand jury this week. Trump is likely to face his fourth indictment in four months.
"Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together! Most immediately, we were just granted access — by written invitation! — to Coffee County's systems. Yay!" reads one message from January 1, 2021, according to CNN. The message was sent in a group chat of colleagues from Sullivan Strickler, a law firm used by Trump's team to review the voting systems in Coffee County, a rural Georgia county that Trump won by 70 percent.
"The mayor" appears to refer to Trump's then-lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
That "written invitation" was reportedly authored by former Coffee County elections official Misty Hampton, who falsely told the Trump team in the days after the election that Dominion voting machines could "very easily" change votes from one candidate to another. A Trump campaign official asked Hampton in an email to "obtain as much information as possible" about the voting situation in the county.
Hampton made a video about the alleged issues with Coffee County’s voting machines which was later used by Giuliani and the rest of Trump’s legal team as part of their efforts to get other state legislators on board with their claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.
The team began looking for access to the voting systems as early as mid-December, per CNN. In the beginning of the month, Hampton delayed the certification of Biden’s win in Georgia by failing to recount results by the deadline.
Trump was presented with a draft of executive orders to seize voting machines during an Oval Office meeting on December 18. That draft mentioned Coffee County by name, according to CNN.
Hampton’s invitation to access the county’s election office came days after the Oval Office meeting.
Trump attorney Katherine Freiss shared the invitation with a group of Trump allies on January 1, 2021. She also sent the invitation to former NYPD Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who worked with Giuliani on his voter-fraud crusade.
Hampton and elections official Cathy Latham then appeared to help the Trump team access the Coffee County voting system, according to messages obtained by CNN. Surveillance footage reportedly shows Latham allowing unauthorized visitors to access the voting systems.
The Fulton County district attorney is reportedly expected to seek more than a dozen indictments against the former president.
Willis's investigation, which began in early 2021, centered on alleged efforts from Trump and his allies to pressure election officials and a plan to put forward fake electors. The investigation launched shortly after Trump called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and pressured him to “find” the votes needed to flip the state in his favor. Trump said as recently as last week that it was a “perfect phone call.”
Nearly 20 people have been told they could face charges as part of the investigation, including several Trump aides and advisors, according to the New York Times.
The indictment is the former president's fourth in four months. He is already facing four felony counts as a result of special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as well as another 42 felony counts stemming from Smith's separate investigation into the former president's alleged mishandling of classified documents.
Before that, Trump was indicted in Manhattan on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
But what did Donald Trump do a lot of talk about a whole lot of people but next to nothing directly about what Donald Trump did.
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