One Trump Georgia Scheme Goes Much Deeper. Where Are the Feds?

On Thursday, former President Donald Trump is being arraigned in Fulton County, Georgia, on RICO and other charges for attempting to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential vote. Included in the vast, multifaceted criminal conspiracy is an alleged scheme to illegally access and steal copies of voting system software from Coffee County, Georgia—a scheme allegedly funded and directed by attorneys for Trump. A closer look at these events reveals a scandalous failure by state authorities to uncover or investigate the breach, and an ongoing and urgent need for federal investigation.

Naturally, the Georgia indictment focuses primarily (though not exclusively) on criminal conduct in Georgia. But the scheme to illegally access voting software, like the broader conspiracy to fraudulently overturn the 2020 election, was a national effort. 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. Willis’ indictment alleges that crimes of computer trespass, computer theft, and computer privacy invasion were elements of Trump’s organized, criminal undertaking to unlawfully stay in office.

Although the inclusion of the Coffee County software scheme in the racketeering indictment is a welcome development, the underlying scheme was initially exposed not by state, let alone federal, authorities. Rather, it was uncovered by a small nonprofit, the Coalition for Good Governance, in connection with a civil lawsuit that has been ongoing since 2017. Last summer, documents obtained by CGG through discovery provided evidence that Sidney Powell had 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.

In late 2020, Coffee County was already emerging as a pivotal jurisdiction in Trump’s fight to unlawfully overturn the election. In December 2020, Misty Hampton—the now-indicted former county election supervisor who allegedly facilitated the voting computer trespass—claimed, in a video that went viral among election deniers, that Georgia’s voting machines allowed votes to be switched. As the state conducted a machine recount in December 2020, Hampton insisted that she was unable to replicate vote totals. That caused Coffee County to refuse to certify its election results, effectively holding up the state certification of the presidential election results for several days. Coffee County was then cited in a draft executive order allegedly drafted by Trump advisers to justify using the military or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines.

A month after the breaches, Hampton was forced to resign from her position as election supervisor, reportedly for falsifying time sheets. In establishing the accuracy of Hampton’s time sheets, the county closely reviewed footage from election office security cameras in order to log the times Hampton came and went. That security-camera footage documented the details of the voting system breach and its participants. Yet county officials apparently failed to notice the unauthorized individuals accessing the voting devices.

Following Hampton’s resignation, her successor, James Barnes, reported “alarming” irregularities in the Coffee elections office to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The secretary’s office told Barnes it would investigate. But according to Barnes, no one followed up.

Shortly after he took office, Barnes found that he couldn’t access the county’s election management server because the password had been changed without authorization from, or knowledge of, Raffensperger’s office. The secretary’s technicians were unable to access the election server and were forced to replace it, but (according to Barnes) they did not investigate further. In August 2021, Barnes wrote a memo to the secretary of state detailing further security concerns he’d observed in the Coffee office when he was first hired, including the disquieting fact that the faceplates of some of the vote tabulators had been removed.

Although the secretary’s investigators had open investigations into other incidents in Coffee County, an investigation summary filed in September 2021 seems to show that, despite these multiple red flags, none of these issues were examined by the secretary’s investigators. In fact, in late April 2022, even after evidence of the breach had been provided, the secretary of state’s chief operating officer, Gabe Sterling, derisively denied that the breach had occurred. And when questioned by a reporter, Raffensperger provided conflicting answers as to when his office first learned of the software breaches.

A few months ago, we made the case in Slate that these matters must be investigated by federal agencies, and we detailed our efforts to urge the Department of Justice, special counsel Jack Smith, and the Department of Homeland Security to act.

There is still no indication that the federal government is investigating the multistate plot to take voting software. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations is still slow-walking the investigation and has not held anyone accountable. And the Georgia secretary of state is still downplaying and dismissing the significance of the software theft.

The indictments in Fulton County, and the failure of the state to investigate and uncover the voting system breaches, further underscore the point that a federal investigation is crucial to understanding the full scope of this scheme, to understanding what threats this criminal enterprise poses to future elections, and to protecting the integrity of upcoming elections.

Willis’ indictment is an important step forward to understand this plot and to hold those guilty accountable, but more is needed. Georgia’s secretary of state and State Election Board must implement reforms to avoid repeating these failures in future elections. And the DOJ must investigate for the safety and security of our democracy.