Report: Team Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election in Georgia Even More Comically Corrupt Than Previously Thought

Except you’ve been dwelling beneath a rock with out mobile or Wi-Fi entry for the final two and a half years, you possible know that Donald Trump and his allies tried their very hardest to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, a plot that’s at the moment beneath felony investigation by Fulton County district legal professional Fani Willis, and will end in a number of indictments for the individuals concerned. However in line with a brand new report, whereas they had been engaged on their scheme to illegally maintain Trump in energy, some members of the group additionally thought-about attempting to overturn the outcomes of Georgia’s Senate runoff, which had gone to Democrat Jon Ossoff. Actual multitaskers!

Per CNN:

In mid-January 2021, two males employed by former President Donald Trump’s authorized crew mentioned over textual content message what to do with knowledge obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, together with whether or not to make use of it as a part of an try to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff outcomes. The texts, despatched two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Espresso County, Georgia, reveal for the primary time that Trump allies thought-about utilizing voting knowledge not solely to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election, but additionally in an effort to maintain a Republican maintain on the US Senate.

“Right here’s the plan. Let’s maintain this shut maintain,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to entry voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 textual content to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a agency that purports to run audits of voting methods. Within the textual content, which was obtained by CNN and has not been beforehand reported, Penrose references the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue. “We solely have till Saturday to resolve if we’re going to use this report back to attempt to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we maintain it for a much bigger second,” Penrose wrote, referring to a possible lawsuit.

As CNN notes, the information in query was obtained on January 7, 2021, after “two individuals walked into an elections workplace in Espresso County, Georgia,” and, with the assistance of an area election official, gained entry to delicate voting data that they uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with quite a few Trump operatives and allies, together with Penrose, Logan, Powell, after which Trump legal professional Rudy Giuliani. Final yr, a former Trump official informed the January 6 committee, beneath oath, that plans to breach voting methods in Georgia had been mentioned throughout conferences within the Oval Workplace, together with in at the least one which Trump was current at. That official, Derek Lyons, informed the Home panel that Giuliani had instructed doing so might be a substitute for ordering the army to grab voting machines.

“His standpoint was that ultimately the marketing campaign, I imagine, was going to have the ability to safe entry to voting machines in Georgia by means of means different than seizure,” Lyons mentioned through the deposition, including that, in line with Giuliani, the machines would “start to indicate proof of the allegations [of fraud] that had been being made,” which may “then be leveraged to…achieve entry to further machines.”

In accordance with CNN, “there isn’t a proof that the Espresso County voting knowledge was [ultimately] used as a part of a lawsuit to attempt to decertify the Senate runoff outcomes. However the truth that the information has but to be recovered has raised issues amongst election safety advocates about the way it might be used probably to disrupt future election outcomes.” In the meantime, an individual accustomed to the matter informed the outlet that Fulton County investigators have proof of Trump allies’ plan to make use of the breached knowledge to attempt to decertify Georgia’s Senate runoff, together with an upfront fee “to a cyber forensics agency that despatched a crew to Espresso County on January 7, 2021.”

Powell, Penrose, and Logan didn’t reply to CNN’s requests for remark. An legal professional for Giuliani declined to remark.