New subpoenas issued in Trump election interference probe focus on Spalding County
Documents I obtained over the weekend show that three people at the center of my investigation into election deniers in Spalding County have been subpoenaed as part of an even bigger probe.
The Spalding County election officials who attempted to hire a company to illegally copy data from election equipment have been subpoenaed as part of an investigation into the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn election results in Georgia, I have learned.
A grand jury empaneled by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sent the subpoenas to Ben Johnson, chair of the Spalding County Board of Elections and Registration, one of his Republican colleagues on the board, Roy McClain, and Kim Slaughter, election supervisor of Spalding County. The subpoenas are related to the trio’s communications with SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta IT firm that is also being investigated for its role in helping the Trump campaign illegally access election equipment in Coffee County. In Spalding County, it was the election officials themselves who were speaking to SullivanStrickler — as opposed to the Republican party officials who were doing so in Coffee County — about copying data from voting machines and other election equipment. This was likely a crime, as explained in my story for Rolling Stone from two weeks ago.
Johnson and McClain are both election deniers, having attended a screening of the debunked election conspiracy documentary 2,000 Mules. (Johnson is also an extreme far-right conspiracy theorist.) And now, after many months of investigating, I can confirm that Slaughter is an election denier as well, something I’ll explain in more detail in a forthcoming story for Rolling Stone.
The subpoenas are important because they will allow Willis’ office to dig into the motive behind the trio’s attempted hiring of SullivanStrickler, something I could only scratch the surface of in the emails I obtained from Spalding County through public records requests. In documents I obtained over the weekend, a Spalding County official confirmed that it was Johnson who first brought SullivanStrickler into the fold in order to create a “forensic copy” of election equipment data. In those same documents, the official alleged that Johnson’s knowledge of the company had nothing to do with the scheme in Coffee County. The subpoenas will allow Willis’ office to fact-check that claim.
The trio’s plan was similar to what happened in Coffee County in that it was motivated by election fraud conspiracy theories. In Coffee County, this resulted in sensitive voter data being shared with right-wing conspiracy theorists, as the Washington Post reported back in August.
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P.S. The photo atop this post is from a screening of the debunked election conspiracy documentary 2,000 Mules that Johnson attended with fellow election board member Roy McClain and Georgia state representative Karen Mathiak. There is much more coming not just on this story, but on other matters crucial to elections in Georgia. If you appreciate this work, please consider subscribing to this newsletter or passing it on to a friend.