Newly obtained footage shows Trump allies ‘handling sensitive voting equipment’ in Georgia: report

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to now-President Joe Biden, some of Trump’s allies not only falsely claimed that the election was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud — they also tried to gain access to sensitive voting equipment in key swing states ranging from Arizona to Michigan. Another was Georgia, where Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — both conservative Republicans — pushed back against the Big Lie and maintained that Biden won the state fairly. And newly released video, according to the New York Times, shows Trump allies “handling sensitive voting equipment in a rural Georgia county weeks after the 2020 election.”

In an article published by the Times on September 20, journalists Danny Hakim, Richard Fausset and Nick Corasaniti explain, “The footage, which was made public as part of long-running litigation over Georgia’s voting system, raises new questions about efforts by Trump affiliates in a number of swing states to gain access to and copy sensitive election software, with the help of friendly local election administrators. One such incident took place on January 7 of last year, the day after supporters of Mr. Trump stormed the Capitol, when a small team traveled to rural Coffee County, GA.”

That group, according to the reporters, “included members of an Atlanta-based firm called SullivanStrickler,” which was hired by Trump attorney Sidney Powell. And on January 7, 2021, Paul Maggio, an exec with the firm, told Powell, “We are on our way to Coffee County, GA, to collect what we can from the election/voting machines and systems.”

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“Weeks later, Scott Hall, an Atlanta-area Trump supporter and bail bondsman who also traveled to Coffee County, said ‘we scanned every freaking ballot’ in a recorded phone conversation,” the Times journalists report. “Mr. Hall said the team had the blessing of the local elections board and ‘scanned all the equipment, imaged all the hard drives and scanned every single ballot.’”

According to Hakim, Fausset and Corasaniti, the footage “show members of the team inside an office handling the county’s poll pads, which contain sensitive voter data.” Charles Tonnie Adams, an elections supervisor for Heard County, Georgia, told the Times that “poll pads contain every registered voter on the state list.” However, Raffensperger spokesman Mike Hassinger told the Times that a poll pad “does have voter information, but it’s not accessible because it’s scrambled behind security protocols.”

“The new videos also show that some of the Trump allies who visited Coffee County were given access to a storage room, and that various people affiliated with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or his allies, had access to the building over several days,” Hakim, Fausset and Corasaniti explain. “The new footage also shows Cathy Latham, then the head of the county’s Republican Party, with members of the Trump team, standing together in an office where the county’s poll pads were laid out on a table. Ms. Latham is among the targets of a criminal investigation in Atlanta, related to her participation as one of an alternate slate of electors who tried to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in Georgia.”

That criminal investigation is Atlanta is being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and is among the many investigations involving Trump, who is also being probed by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 select committee.

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