Senior Georgia Elections Official Slams Trump Rhetoric: ‘Someone’s Going to Get Killed’
President Trump’s rhetoric regarding alleged election fraud in Georgia could lead to violence, Gabriel Sterling, voting implementation officer for the Georgia Secretary of State, told reporters at a Tuesday press conference.
Sterling said that a contractor for Dominion Voting Systems received death threats, including a noose, earlier in the day after he transferred a report on ballots from a voting machine to a county computer. Trump and his legal team have repeatedly alleged that Dominion voting equipment is faulty or insecure.
Additionally, Sterling mentioned that Trump campaign lawyer Joe diGenova said former U.S. cybersecurity head Christopher Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot” for defending the validity of the election results. (DiGenova later said his comments were meant as a joke.)
"It. Has. All. Gone. Too. Far," says @GabrielSterling with Georgia Sec of State after a Dominion tech's life was threatened with a noose. "Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language….all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this." pic.twitter.com/OnHaxgpJx6
— Brendan Keefe (@BrendanKeefe) December 1, 2020
“It’s all gone too far. All of it,” a visibly agitated Sterling told reporters. “It has to stop. Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions. This has to stop! We need you to step up and if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.”
Trump has repeatedly alleged that Joe Biden won the state of Georgia through widespread voter fraud. Sterling said that the president’s comments, while he does not condemn threats against elections officials and workers, could incite violence in the state.
“Someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right. It’s not right,” Sterling said.
Attorney General William Barr announced on Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud on a level that could change the outcome of the general elections.
“There’s a growing tendency to use the criminal justice system as sort of a default fix-all, and people don’t like something they want the Department of Justice to come in and ‘investigate,’” Barr told the Associated Press.
Trump-campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis immediately disputed Barr’s conclusion, saying in a statement that Barr’s “opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”
