Georgia election workers show what a hateful liar Trump is

Hines Brian June 21, 2022No Comments

At this point I'm rarely shocked by anything Donald Trump does or says.

But today's televised hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol moved me deeply, because what Trump did to two Georgia election workers — Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman — was so horrible even by Trumpian standards.

Moss and Freeman at the January 6 committee hearing

He and his lying accomplice, Rudy Giuliani, destroyed the lives of Moss and Freeman by falsely accusing them of falsifying many thousands of ballots for Joe Biden.

It was infuriating to listen to Moss and Freeman talk about their lives being turned inside down by Trump and Giuliani. (Moss testified in person today; the committee showed videos of Freeman's previous testimony .)

These are honest hardworking women who believed strongly in helping people vote. Trump doesn't possess even 1% of the integrity and morality of Moss and Freeman. Yet so far he hasn't been indicted for his election-related crimes.

Hopefully Trump will be held to account for his misdeeds, especially since there's every indication he and his Republican cronies plan to try to steal the next presidential election if Trump runs again. And maybe even if he doesn't run.

Because a majority of Republicans, one poll had it at 70%, believe Trump's lie that he won the 2020 presidential election because of some mysterious voter fraud that lacks any evidence but supposedly occurred because Trump says so.

It's a national embarrassment that one of our two major political parties has gone so far down the election fraud rabbit hole. How anyone can vote for Republican candidates is beyond me.

Check out a Washington Post story, "Election workers describe 'hateful' threats after Trump's false claims." Some excerpts:

Shaye Moss’s life forever changed on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump’s top campaign lawyer, publicly claimed that she and her mother, a fellow poll worker in Fulton County, Ga., had rigged the outcome in her state.

Moss’s supervisor suggested that day that she check her social media accounts to see if she had received any threats, as others in the office had. She was stunned by what she saw when she pulled up her Facebook Messenger account.

“It was just a lot of horrible things there,” Moss said at a hearing Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and “hateful,” said Moss, who is Black. “A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ”

That was only the beginning. Moss eventually stopped going to the grocery store, where she feared acquaintances might say her name and call attention from believers of Trump’s voter-fraud claims. Election deniers showed up at the home of her grandmother and tried to push their way in to search for evidence of fraud. Both she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were forced into hiding. They quit their jobs with the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections, where Moss had proudly served as a poll worker for more than a decade.

…Moss said she was speechless when her supervisors showed her a recording of Giuliani’s statement to a Georgia state Senate committee investigating the 2020 result. Giuliani claimed that Moss and Freeman had plotted to kick out observers at the State Farm Arena, where the county had set up a ballot counting operation. They had brought in suitcases filled with fraudulent ballots for Biden and scanned them through the tabulating teams multiple times, he said. He described surveillance video from the arena that he claimed showed the two exchanging USB memory sticks, presumably containing fraudulent vote counts, “as if they’re vials of cocaine.”

“I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor that they are engaged in surreptitious, illegal activity,” Giuliani said. “And they’re still walking around Georgia. They should have been questioned already. Their homes should have been searched for evidence.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the questioning at Tuesday’s hearing, asked Moss: “None of that was true, was it?”

Moss’s answer: “None of it.”

Schiff then asked about the USB memory sticks.

“What was your mom actually handing you on that video?”

“A ginger mint,” Moss said.

Trump also attacked Freeman and Moss personally in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) just days before the Capitol attack, mentioning Freeman 18 times and describing her at one point as a “professional vote scammer and hustler.” The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call and published it last year.

The threats and harassment that ensued even reached Moss’s grandmother, who called one day, screaming, to say people had knocked on her door and, when she had opened it, had tried to push into the home in search of Moss and Freeman. Moss recounted how awful she felt telling her grandmother, “who likes to get her steps in walking around the neighborhood,” that she had to stop exercising outside for her own safety. At night, pranksters “continuously” sent pizzas to her home that the delivery drivers expected her to pay for, Moss testified.