The Devil’s in details down in Georgia

Created
Fri, 25/08/2023 - 00:30
Updated
Fri, 25/08/2023 - 00:30
This one’s been off my radar The insurrectionist-in-chief plans to proudly turn himself in today for booking in Atlanta. Donald Trump, the ever-blustery showman and former president, has scheduled the media circus in primetime for maximum television ratings. Receiving less coverage is the multi-state plot to access voting software included in Fulton County District Attorney Fanu Willis’ indictment. Ben Clements and Susan Greenhalgh take up the story for Slate. “There have been multiple accounts of Trump supporters unlawfully accessing voting systems to copy proprietary vote-recording and vote-counting software in Michigan, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These reports spurred criminal investigations in their respective states, but until Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis filed charges last week, none of these probes had tied the crimes back to Trump’s coordinated, multipronged plot to stay in power,” the pair explain. Willis includes the software heist in her racketeering indictment. The irony is that it was uncovered not by state or federal authorities but by the nonprofit “Coalition for Good Governance, in connection with a civil lawsuit that has been ongoing since 2017.” The group turned up evidence that Sydney Powell “allegedly funded and directed the January 2021 theft in Coffee County as part of a multistate contract to take copies of voting software—in not just Georgia, but also Michigan and Nevada.” Clements and Greenhalgh lay out the plot that forced the resignation of Coffee County election supervisor, Misty Hampton (since indicted): Following Hampton’s resignation, her successor, James Barnes, reported “alarming” irregularities in the Coffee elections office to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The…