How deep the rot goes
The former head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was CC'd on conversations among election deniers about how to prove fraud in favor of Trump.
Update: Former head of the GBI, Vic Reynolds, has responded to questions about emails he received from parties working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. His comments are included below.
One of the many things I’ve learned in the last year is that the Republican party of Georgia is as deep in the woods of election denialism as any state-level GOP. From the top down, Georgia Republicans are infected with election conspiracists and Trump zealots.
Among the Georgia Republicans who sought to overturn the 2020 election results are a who’s who of the party’s elite. They include David Schafer, who led attempts to have fake electors cast ballots for Donald Trump. (For those efforts, Schafer was dressed down by a state judge in November — but was rewarded by his fellow Republicans by retaining his chairmanship of the state GOP.) There is also William Ligon, a former state senator who led efforts to sow doubt in the 2020 election over bogus fraud claims and who was one of the only people from Georgia in the infamous Willard Hotel War Room on January 6. I could go on, but you get the point: Georgia’s most powerful Republicans were deeply involved with efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Then, there is what happened in Coffee County and what almost happened in Spalding County. You may remember that a group of Republican officials in Coffee County coordinated with the Trump campaign to access voting equipment there. (A similar attempt was made in Spalding County, but was thwarted when the Secretary of State’s office got wind of the scheme and shut it down, as I reported in October.) All of this has been known for a while now, thanks to Jon Swaine and Emma Brown at the Washington Post and my own efforts on this newsletter and elsewhere. But today I can report on much more that was happening behind-the-scenes.
In documents released as part of a long-running lawsuit brought by groups focused on election equipment security, we now know some of the people involved with efforts to find voter fraud and flip the election for Trump. Interestingly, those conversations included the former head of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the state’s largest and most powerful law enforcement agency.
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Following Trump’s historic loss in Georgia on Election Night, Republicans across the state began working feverishly to overturn the results. They looked for fraud that could force a recount. They called for investigations and audits. In one case, a rural county election board run by election deniers refused to certify results showing Biden’s win. Much of that was done publicly, but thanks to the documents I’ve obtained we have an inside look at what was happening privately in Republican circles.
A little less than a week after the election, on Nov. 9, a Marietta attorney named Mark Johnson emailed Bert Reeves, a Georgia state lawmaker. CC’d on the email was Vic Reynolds, former head of the GBI; Skip Chesshire, a former Georgia county court administrator who was forced to resign after scores of sexual misconduct allegations; and Harry MacDougald, a well-connected Republican lawyer.
“Bert and Vic, here is the situation,” Johnson began. “Sidney Powell called Don Brown, a Charlotte lawyer I know (sic) yesterday for his assistance.” (Brown is a vocal election denier who worked to convince the South Carolina attorney general to help overturn election results.)
Johnson went on to say that Brown and MacDougald had “been drilling down on election software issues” and would need “specific data” in order to prove that votes had been flipped.
The greeting of the email “Bert and Vic,” reads pretty informal, as if the correspondence was part of an ongoing conversation — but Reynolds said that wasn’t the case. “For The Republic,” Johnson signed off at the end of the email.
The next day, Nov. 10, MacDougald replied to Johnson and the others. The subject of the email: “Data file needed for vote swapping/switching.” In the email, MacDougald described the data he would need in order to prove that votes had been switched to steal the election from Trump — a bogus theory propagated by election deniers.
Reynolds didn’t say why he thought he was the recipient of emails about election fraud that were also sent to a small and well-connected group of people in Republican political and legal circles. Regarding Johnson, Reynolds said he didn’t know him, had never met him and had never spoken to him.
“I never talked to Attorney Johnson about the content of the emails,” Reynolds told me. “I found nothing in them that warranted the GBI’s attention.”
Still, Reynolds was in interesting company on those emails. (Keep in mind that these emails were not sent to Reynold’s GBI email address. I know, because I asked the GBI to search his inbox for the emails and they found none.) The recipients of the emails that Reynolds was CC’d on include:
Frank Strickland, who has been called a “lawyer-architect of the modern Georgia GOP”
Don Brown, an election-denying conservative lawyer in North Carolina
Johnson, the Marietta lawyer
Bert Reeves, a Republican state representative
Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s director for the state of Georgia
But that wasn’t the end of Reynold’s digital ties to election conspiracy theories. On Dec. 15, Reynolds emailed himself — from his personal email address to his former email address at the GBI — a “forensics report” from Antrim County, Michigan. The report was written by Allied Securities Operations Group (ASOG), an election conspiracy theory organization run by Russell Ramsland. Ramsland has become something of a celebrity expert in election denier circles, often boasting of dual degrees from Harvard and Duke while noting his time spent working at NASA and MIT. Of course, none of his evidence of election fraud has ever held up in court. The ASOG report that Reynolds forwarded himself goes on for 23 pages and, to an uneducated reader, might come off as sophisticated. The report details extremely technical findings gleaned from Antrim County’s election equipment in an attempt to prove that votes were flipped. But the report exposes the lack of sophistication — not to mention the bias — of its authors on its first page, when it throws aside the scientific method to claim that “the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.” Obviously, there is absolutely no amount of election equipment data that could ever prove the motives behind the people who designed the software and equipment used by Antrim County. Still, Ramsland concludes that “intentional errors” in the equipment cause the “bulk adjudication of ballots” which “leads to voter or election fraud.”
The entire report reads like it was written by someone who was obsessed with finding evidence of fraud, and would go to any lengths to create something that proved fraud — whether those were the findings or not. It is written without clarity or precision, bouncing from one subject to the next, while numbers and statistics taken from the county’s election equipment are thrown around wildly. To anyone with above-average reading comprehension skills, the report is easily dismissed as a work of unprofessional conjecture.
Reynolds told me he doesn’t remember who sent him the ASOG report. He said he also didn’t remember “reading it or what it might have contained. I probably read it, but again, I don’t remember what was in it,” Reynolds said. “I usually had a great deal of information I tried to consume as Director on a daily basis.”
Reynolds stuck to his guns in response to my questions, saying he believed there was no fraud that affected the 2020 election.
“[The GBI] received all kinds of calls and correspondence about the alleged improprieties of the election, the overwhelming majority of which we disregarded,” Reynolds said. “What we did look into confirmed our belief that there were no acts of fraud, etc., that affected the election. None.”
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Thanks to an appointment from Gov. Brian Kemp, Reynolds is now a judge in Cobb County. Don Brown continues to work as a lawyer in Charlotte, representing a former Army lieutenant who was convicted — and then pardoned by Trump — of war crimes. As far as I can tell all the lawyers in the emails I’ve obtained continue their practices. Robert Sinners has gone on to work for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, where he was the subject of this bizarrely glowing profile by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Mark Niesse in which Sinners was described as having undergone a “conversion” from being an election denier. Funny, because two years before that profile was written, Sinners was emailing Republican lawyers saying it was his “belief that there was a coordinated effort in some counties to disenfranchise Republican voters due to vague statutes and loopholes,” according to the emails I’ve obtained.
For his part, MacDougald denied any involvement in the scheme to swipe data from election equipment in Coffee County. That event, objectively, was a crime, and for the life of me I don’t understand why no one has been indicted yet. MacDougald said there was “no connection whatsoever between my guessing about how to detect vote swapping on the one hand and anything in Coffee County on the other.”
But that’s just the beginning of MacDougald’s involvement with election deniers. The rest will have to wait until next week.
Thanks as always for reading Where Do We Go From Here. I’m continuing my work on election deniers in Georgia and, as usual, county election boards are charging me thousands of dollars to release records of communications that will likely show more people involved in attempts to subvert democracy. If you’re interested in supporting the cause, you can donate to my Patreon.
fantastic work Justin. looking forward to more! just shared your post with Marilyn Marks, who'll be very interested to read it.