Prosecutors investigating the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results in Georgia have texts and emails that connect members of former President Donald Trump’s legal team to the January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, according to a CNN exclusive.
Texts and other evidence collected by investigators in the Georgia criminal probe indicate Trump’s lawyers tried to gain access to Coffee County’s voting systems so Trump’s allies could produce evidence for the unfounded theory that the election was stolen, according to CNN’s sources.
Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, is expected to present her case before a grand jury this week and to seek charges against roughly a dozen individuals, including those involved in the Coffee County voting systems breach.
“Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!” an employee from the firm Sullivan Strickler wrote in a group chat on Jan. 1, referring to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was Trump’s personal attorney. The firm was hired by Trump’s legal team to examine voting systems in Coffee County.
“Most immediately, we were just granted access — by written invitation! — to Coffee County’s systems. Yay!” the text reads.
Video footage unearthed last year showed Cathy Latham, a GOP county official who posed as a fake elector for Trump, and two others enter Coffee County’s elections office on Jan. 7, 2021, which was the same day a voting machine was breached there.
A former Trump official testified under oath during last year’s hearings by the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, that Trump and others discussed plans to access voting systems in Georgia. At least one meeting happened in the Oval Office with Trump present, on Dec. 18, 2020, the official said.
Six days before Trump’s team gained access to the voting systems, Misty Hampton, who was then a Coffee County local elections official, wrote a “written invitation” that was sent to Trump’s lawyers, according to CNN.
Willis has been investigating whether Trump and his associates attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, where voters picked President Joe Biden by a narrow margin.
She is expected to present her case to a Georgia grand jury, which will likely weigh charges that could lead to Trump’s fourth criminal indictment this year.