Report: Team Trump’s Attempt to Overturn the Election in Georgia Even More Comically Corrupt Than Previously Thought

Unless you’ve been living under a rock without cellular or Wi-Fi access for the last two and a half years, you likely know that Donald Trump and his allies tried their very hardest to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia, a plot that is currently under criminal investigation by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, and could result in one or more indictments for the people involved. But according to a new report, while they were working on their scheme to illegally keep Trump in power, some members of the group also considered trying to overturn the results of Georgia’s Senate runoff, which had gone to Democrat Jon Ossoff. Real multitaskers!

Per CNN:

In mid-January 2021, two men hired by former President Donald Trump’s legal team discussed over text message what to do with data obtained from a breached voting machine in a rural county in Georgia, including whether to use it as part of an attempt to decertify the state’s pending Senate runoff results. The texts, sent two weeks after operatives breached a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump allies considered using voting data not only to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but also in an effort to keep a Republican hold on the US Senate.

“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold,” Jim Penrose, a former NSA official working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, wrote in a January 19 text to Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, a firm that purports to run audits of voting systems. In the text, which was obtained by CNN and has not been previously reported, Penrose references the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue. “We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote, referring to a potential lawsuit.

As CNN notes, the data in question was obtained on January 7, 2021, after “two people walked into an elections office in Coffee County, Georgia,” and, with the help of a local election official, gained access to sensitive voting information that they uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with a number of Trump operatives and allies, including Penrose, Logan, Powell, and then Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Last year, a former Trump official told the January 6 committee, under oath, that plans to breach voting systems in Georgia had been discussed during meetings in the Oval Office, including in at least one which Trump was present at. That official, Derek Lyons, told the House panel that Giuliani had suggested doing so could be an alternative to ordering the military to seize voting machines.

“His point of view was that in some way the campaign, I believe, was going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” Lyons said during the deposition, adding that, according to Giuliani, the machines would “begin to show evidence of the allegations [of fraud] that were being made,” which could “then be leveraged to…gain access to additional machines.”

According to CNN, “there is no evidence that the Coffee County voting data was [ultimately] used as part of a lawsuit to try to decertify the Senate runoff results. But the fact that the data has yet to be recovered has raised concerns among election security advocates about how it could be used potentially to disrupt future election results.” Meanwhile, a person familiar with the matter told the outlet that Fulton County investigators have evidence of Trump allies’ plan to use the breached data to try to decertify Georgia’s Senate runoff, including an upfront payment “to a cyber forensics firm that sent a team to Coffee County on January 7, 2021.”

Powell, Penrose, and Logan did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. An attorney for Giuliani declined to comment.