- Ga. prosecutors have found emails and texts linking members of Trump's legal team to a key voting breach, per CNN.
- The breach in question occurred in Coffee County, a rural GOP-heavy jurisdiction in southeastern Georgia.
The Atlanta-area prosecutorial team probing efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia have obtained text messages and emails linking individuals on former President Donald Trump's legal team to a 2021 voting system breach in Republican-heavy Coffee County, according to CNN.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis might seek more than a dozen indictments later this month, as she is reportedly eyeing a sweeping multi-state case that involves conspiracy and racketeering charges. And some of the individuals linked to the breach in Coffee County might also be charged in the larger criminal investigation.
According to individuals who spoke with CNN, investigators in Georgia have amassed evidence that the breach in Coffee County was driven by Trump's legal team so his allies could examine sensitive voting software.
Such evidence would largely put to rest the notion that the breach in Coffee County — which Trump won with nearly 70% of the vote over now-President Joe Biden — was led by local Trump allies in the rural southeastern Georgia jurisdiction. Instead, it would show that the breach was linked to the former president's inner circle.
Allies of Trump sought to examine the voting software in Coffee County in their efforts to find data that could corroborate the then-president's debunked claims that he was the true victor in Georgia.
Biden won Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million ballots cast, performing strongly in Fulton County — which includes Atlanta — and the capital city's populous suburbs. But after the 2020 election, Trump pushed Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results, to no avail, with the pressure campaign resulting in an hourlong phone conversation in January 2021 where the then-president asked Raffensperger to "find" the necessary votes in order to win the state.
Trump's phone call with Raffensperger and the push to create an alternate slate of presidential electors have both been key parts of the criminal investigation conducted by Willis, but the breach in Coffee County became an increasingly prominent aspect of the Fulton County investigation almost a year ago, according to CNN.
The text messages and court documents revealed that Trump attorneys had their eyes on Coffee County before January 6, 2021, as they feverishly tried to produce any evidence of mass voter fraud, which the then-president contended had led to his defeat in the longtime Republican stronghold.
In 2022, an ex-Trump official told the House January 6 select panel that efforts to examine voting software in Georgia had been brought up in a December 2020 meeting at the White House where the then-president was present.
Just days before pro-Trump allies accessed the Coffee County voting systems, a local elections official suspected of aiding in the breach issued a "written invitation" to the then-president's lawyers, per text messages obtained by CNN.
Per the CNN report, Georgia investigators have probed the participants of the breach, which included Misty Hampton, the Coffee County official who appeared to have written that invitation.
The investigators have also looked into what role Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell played in the breach, according to CNN.
Powell was once a member of Trump's legal team. Giuliani, who was formerly Trump's personal attorney, played a critical role in promoting the then-president's debunked theories of election fraud in a multitude of swing states after the November 2020 election.
In text messages obtained by CNN, Giuliani was often called "the Mayor" by an individual employed at the firm SullivanStrickler, which Powell had brought on to investigate the Coffee County voting systems.
"Just landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!" the employee wrote in a January 1, 2021, group chat. "Most immediately, we were just granted access – by written invitation! – to Coffee County's systems. Yay!"
A representative of Willis' office did not respond to CNN's request for comment.