Georgia election hearing claiming widespread fraud part of indictment against Trump

One of the key parts of the new indictment against former President Donald Trump and several of his allies here in Georgia revolved around a state Senate committee hearing where Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and others testified about alleged voter fraud they said happened in the 2020 president election.

During the hearing, Giuliani and others accused Democrats of being involved in a nationwide conspiracy to throw the election for Joe Biden and showed video from State Farm Arena where they said election workers threw Republicans out of the room and counted ballots in the middle of the night.

“I think that today revealed the smoking gun we’ve been looking for. The video makes it clear,” Giuliani told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot following the first day of those hearings. “They took ballots from under a table and counted them in the middle of the night. This is what they were doing all throughout the country. Luckily, there is now a tape of it.”

Giuliani claimed the Democrats rigged the election in five other states as well. When asked what he had to say about Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s comments saying the 2020 election was fair and there were no problems, Giuliani said, “People make mistakes.”

“I hope he can own up to it. People make mistakes. He didn’t have that tape available to him, he didn’t have all these witnesses available to him, these take time to develop. But with the number of witnesses now, 100 specific witnesses who have affidavits of fraud and a videotape that is beyond doubt proof that the Democrats engaged in a really, really blatant fraud to steal the election in Georgia and much of the rest of the country,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani also made claims that thousands of convicted felons, dead people, and people out of state voted in Georgia.

After the hearing, “(Trump) issued a tweet amplifying the knowingly false claims made in (the) presentation in Georgia: ‘Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by the Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!’” a federal indictment handed up against Trump on Aug. 1 said.

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Following the hearing, the video and all of the claims were quickly investigated and debunked by federal and state investigators.

Even with the allegations made by Giuliani being found to be untrue, Trump repeatedly stated that there was election fraud throughout Georgia, an August indictment said.

The document said on Dec. 8, 2020, a senior campaign advisor of Trump’s “expressed frustration that many of [an unnamed co-conspirator’s] and his legal team’s claims could not be substantiated.”

The document says as early as mid-November, the advisor had told Trump that the claims of dead people voting in Georgia were not true.

That same advisor also had this to say about the State Farm Arena video in an email mentioned in the indictment:

“When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases.”

Following yet a third recount of the votes in Georgia, Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray went through the full video from State Farm Arena with elections officials, frame-by-frame to see if there was any evidence of voter fraud and look into the claims by Giuliani and his associates.

Gray looked not at just the short clip the Trump campaign shared, but the critical hours before and after that clip as well.

What did they find?

“No magically-appearing ballots,” Gabriel Sterling with the Secretary of State’s office said. “These were ballots that were processed in front of the monitors, processed in front of the monitors and placed there in front of the monitors.”

So what about the time gap between when the media and observers left and when the observers returned about an hour later? Employees scanned ballots.

“These are just typical everyday election workers are just doing their jobs,” Sterling said. “This is not some Ocean’s Eleven-level scheme being put together in the middle of the night.”

There was about an hour that workers scanned ballots before a state monitor arrived, but video shows those moments. The monitor then observed counting until they stopped for the night.

The lead election investigator looked at all the video and said there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.

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