All the president's men in Georgia
The ties between the Trump administration and the illegal breach of election equipment in Coffee County, Georgia are becoming more clear.
It was less than a week after the 2020 election when Harry MacDougald began looking into how he could prove that votes in Georgia had been illegally switched from former president Donald Trump to Joe Biden. He contacted William Briggs, an election denier and COVID truther, about his theories on how this historic fraud went down.
Briggs, who called the judge responsible for sanctioning Trump’s election conspiracist attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood a “barely literate black woman,” had created a chart showing how precinct-level voting data could prove that votes were switched. “If you can rule out all precincts as the source (of votes), then you have strong evidence of a hack of the election reporting system,” MacDougald concluded of Briggs’ research in an email to Mark Johnson, a Marietta attorney. Also receiving the email, which I obtained through a release of records related to a long-running lawsuit over Georgia election equipment, were Bert Reeves, a former state representative now working at Georgia Tech; Frank Strickland, a Republican attorney in Atlanta; and Don Brown, a Charlotte attorney known for work on behalf of conservative causes. Strickland passed on MacDougald’s conclusions to Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s director in Georgia. Distressingly — and hilariously, depending on your sense of humor — Sinners now works for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger’s office.
“I can say this is a serious issue that our team has actively been investigating,” Sinners told Strickland in an email about MacDougald’s vote-swapping theory. “We're recording all of the facts, and I think there's reason to believe this could be the case in Georgia. We are assembling a team for the recount and runoff elections. We need all hands on deck.”
There is no evidence that votes were swapped — electronically or otherwise — from Trump to Biden. But the subject has become a matter of obsession for election conspiracy theorists. Proving “vote-swapping” or “vote-switching” as it’s known in election denier circles seems to be second only to ballot-harvesting as the favored bogeyman of believers in election fraud. MacDougald was one of many people throughout the country trying to prove that votes were switched. Unlike many of those people — angry and misinformed Republicans futilely screaming through their keyboards into the internet void in the wake of the 2020 election — MacDougald wasn’t just some radicalized crank. He’s an Ivy League-educated lawyer who is licensed to practice his craft everywhere from trial courts across Georgia to the U.S. Supreme Court. A member of the Federalist Society, MacDougald has represented the fossil fuel industry in lawsuits against the EPA, among his many legal duties and achievements.
Since his involvement in post-election attempts to prove voter fraud, MacDougald went on to represent former acting head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Jeffrey Clark. Clark was Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ in the aftermath of the 2020 election before leadership threatened to resign en masse. That’s because Clark is an election denier who circulated a draft letter within Justice calling for Georgia’s legislature to enter into special session to investigate bogus claims of election fraud. (Side note: that letter referenced a report from former Georgia state Sen. William Ligon, which featured many of the debunked claims of election fraud that became fodder for election deniers here. Ligon was one of the few Georgians present at Steve Bannons’ War Room at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 6.) MacDougald’s representation of Clark is an important and direct link between the Trump administration and efforts to overturn the election in Georgia. And I’m far from the only person who has wanted to know more about those connections. In questions to Clark, members of the Jan. 6 Committee also wanted to know more about what Clark knew or had to tell about the White House’s involvement in overturning Georgia’s election results. They told MacDougald and Clark so directly.
“We wanted to ask him about further interactions at any time he had with the Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, including Mr. Meadows' travel to Georgia, and interaction with Georgia State officials.”
Meadows’ conversations with Georgia lawmakers have been well documented. They run the gamut from general recount and audit work that comes after any election to the more obscure, like the propagation of the ItalyGate conspiracy theory about voting machines that was shopped to Meadows by state Sen. Marty Harbin. What has never been clear is exactly how far up efforts to illegally breach election equipment in Coffee County (and probably elsewhere in Georgia) went within the Trump administration. Thanks to the Meadows texts, the emails I’ve obtained, previous reporting by the Washington Post, and good, old-fashioned common sense, we now have a better idea.
***
The genesis of the vote-swapping theory that became the subject of conversation among MacDougald, his fellow attorneys, and Sinners appears to be a chart from Briggs’ website showing results in a Pennsylvania county, and posted five days after the election. (Reading the accompanying post by Briggs now is pretty amusing considering the corrections and updates he had to make that largely disprove his theories about vote-swapping.) Two days after Briggs post, MacDougald emailed Johnson, Strickland, Reeves, Brown and Vic Reynolds, former head of the GBI. But within a month from the emails I’ve obtained, vote-swapping would become known far beyond this circle of fairly obscure Republican lawyers and pols in Georgia.
That’s because, in early December, an election official in Coffee County posted a video of her switching votes on a ballot. Soon, the video went viral among right-wing media. In a Fox News online story , the unseen narrator of the video is called Misty Martin, who since being divorced is now Misty Hampton. Hampton was eventually forced to resign as Coffee County’s election supervisor as it became clear that she not only helped Sidney Powell and other Trump lackeys breach election equipment there but lied to the Secretary of State about it. That Fox News story is from Dec. 10 and includes comments from Rudy Giuliani’s testimony that day at the Georgia legislature about the vote-swapping “evidence” from Hampton’s video.
From a video by a local Trump-supporting bumpkin like Misty Hampton to being legitimized on national TV during a Georgia legislative committee hearing by Giuliani, the vote-swapping theory had gone a long way — and quickly. But it didn’t end there.
Three days after Giuliani’s appearance in the Georgia legislature, an obscure organization called the Allied Securities Operations Group (ASOG) released a report detailing its findings after being granted access by a judge to election equipment in Antrim County, Michigan. The ASOG report, which was almost surely written in its entirety by the group’s leader, Texas businessman Russell Ramsland, made the dubious claim that election equipment run by Dominion Voting Systems was “intentionally and purposefully designed” to create ballot errors that would allow election staff to change votes — as Hampton had said she had done in her infamous video.
That’s when vote-swapping and the larger world of Dominion conspiracy theories took off like a rocket.
By December 16, Powell and others, including Mike Flynn, had drafted an executive order that would have allowed Trump to order the military to seize voting machines nationwide and investigate them for fraud. The order begins by citing ASOG’s Antrim County report, and concludes by mentioning the Coffee County elections board’s refusal to certify 2020’s results.
Meanwhile, Powell, Wood, Giuliani, and many others began taking vote-swapping and other Dominion conspiracies to partners in right-wing media, which dutifully reported on every allegation as if it were solid evidence of a stolen election. Trump, of course, blasted these conspiracies from his social media megaphone with about as much vetting as you’d expect from a lifelong reader of New York City tabloids. As many people have correctly observed, the tens of millions of Americans already primed to believe election lies then had those beliefs legitimized by an unhinged president. But Trump was far from alone in legitimizing false claims of election fraud in pursuit of overturning the election. Across the country, co-conspirators in state legislatures and courthouse who either believed the lies themselves or were willing to pretend they did in order to appease Republican power structures began working in support of the real conspiracy — to overturn the election.
Among them were men like Harry MacDougald. On Dec. 18, MacDougald joined Powell and several other attorneys in suing Michigan and Georgia over the election. Among the evidence of fraud cited in the lawsuit was the fact that Coffee County had refused to certify its election results. That was a bold decision and set Coffee County apart from Georgia’s 158 other counties. The refusal to certify the results became a useful citation in Powell’s election lawsuits, letters demanding investigations and reports alleging widespread election fraud.
By December 28, Jeffrey Clark had written his draft letter at the Justice Department. The letter would have made it the DOJ’s official position that the Georgia legislature should enter into special session to withhold election results in pursuit of overturning the election for Trump — all based on election conspiracies like vote-swapping.
Clark was reportedly Trump’s pick to lead the DOJ, largely based on Clark’s support of election lies. Thankfully that never happened, but it took threats of DOJ officials resigning en masse to stop Trump from appointing an election stooge as the agency’s leader. We all know what happened after Clark’s letter: January 6, the attempted insurrection, 147 members of Congress siding with conspiracy theories and lies in refusing to certify Biden’s election win, plus endless months of legal wrangling over election results carried out by legal warriors like MacDougald. Then, on Jan. 7, Hampton and others walked representatives of Cyber Ninjas and the Atlanta IT firm SullivanStrickler into the Coffee County elections office to carry out what is, to date, the only instance of an illegal breach of election equipment in 2020.
***
Almost a year later, in November 2021, MacDougald and Clark faced investigators with the January 6 committee. The pair refused to answer questions about anything other than the events of January 6, citing broad executive privilege despite the fact that Trump had said nothing to Clark about not answering the committee’s questions.
It is possible that Clark didn’t want to talk about anything other than the events of January 6 for a variety of reasons. Almost all of them likely have to do with his support of election lies, and some of them might have to do with his proximity to people like Sidney Powell and others who were angling for martial law in order to ensure that Trump remained president.
But of all the hotbeds of election conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election — Wayne County, Michigan, Maricopa County, Arizona, Philadelphia and elsewhere — Clark’s draft letter focused only on Georgia. Similarly, Powell and Flynn’s executive order to seize voting machines mentioned only two counties in the entire country — Coffee and Ware, both in Georgia. And in Coffee County, election-denying Trump acolytes were on the move from Election Night on, trying to gain access to data that would prove the election was stolen from the former president. On Nov. 10, 2020, the same day he received the introduction to MacDougald, Sinners was talking to Hampton about false claims of fraud in Coffee County.
There, these would-be insurrectionists didn’t stop until they actually had done something illegal. With the illegally seized data in hand, this band of election deniers got to work doing something with it. A month after the data breach, a plane owned by Trump’s election denier confidant Mike Lindell left Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago is located, and flew to the Coffee County seat of Douglas, Georgia. The plane then left for Texas, according to masterful reporting by my old pal from Ferguson, Jon Swaine at the Washington Post. What’s fairly obvious here is that Trump sent Lindell to Coffee County to look into the bogus allegations of fraud, and Lindell then flew to Texas to see Ramsland to discuss the new findings. Someone with subpoena power should look into that.
By the time Clark faced investigators with the January 6 committee, MacDougald had armed himself with legal arguments that broad executive privilege should apply to Clark’s testimony. In doing so, MacDougald argued that Trump’s lawsuit against the National Archives — which sought to prevent the release of material related to the events of January 6 to the committee investigating the attempted insurrection — should apply to Clark. What does that lawsuit have to do with Clark’s testimony about his actions surrounding the events of January 6? Nothing, the committee told MacDougald, because Jeffrey Clark is not Donald Trump.
Other than the overly-broad application of executive privilege, the other reason that Clark wouldn’t talk to the committee, of course, is that he was up to no good. Trump was up to no good. Powell, Wood, Ramsland, Flynn, Lindell — no good. In Georgia, Frank Strickland, Mark Johnson, Sinners and way too many others to name in a single post were all up to their How-Bout-Them-Dawgs necks in no good. MacDougald was up to no good, too, using his sway and connections just like the rest of this good ol’ boy legal crew to hoist himself higher and higher up the flagpole in what was a bottom-up effort to overturn election results in Georgia.
***
Thank you to all the readers of this newsletter for subscribing. If you like what you see here, please tell a friend. As I noted last week, counties throughout Georgia continue to charge me thousands of dollars to release emails related to election deniers working at county election boards. If you would like to help support that work, you can donate to my Patreon here. Next week, I plan to get into who accessed election equipment software throughout Georgia and what they might be doing with it.