Katelyn Myrick/ZUMA
As Fulton County DA Fani Willis prepares to present the findings of the investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election this week, CNN reports on text messages directly connecting the former president’s lawyers to a January 2021 voting systems breach. From CNN:
Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County—a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation.
The breach came as the Trump campaign aggressively hunted for nonexistent election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The effort, which laid the groundwork for the violence on January 6, featured Trump calling Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding that he find nonexistent votes to back the unfounded claims. The former president appeared to refer to that very phone call, which he previously referred to as “perfect,” in his response to the CNN report on Sunday:
Last month, a Georgia state judge rejected Trump’s request to throw out the grand jury report and disqualify Willis from investigating him. As I wrote at the time, the nine-page order demonstrated the judge had little patience for Trump’s efforts to “perplexingly, prematurely, and with the standard pugnacity”—derail the justice system.
