On January 7, 2021, a group of forensics experts working for lawyers allied with President Donald Trump spent eight hours in a southern Georgia county election office, copying software and sensitive data from its voting machines. election.
Under questioning last month for a civil lawsuit, a former Georgia Republican Party official named Cathy Latham said in sworn testimony that happened briefly at the Coffee County office that afternoon. He said he stayed in the lobby and spoke to a junior officer about an unrelated matter at the front desk.
“I didn’t go into the office,” Latham said. according to a transcript of his statement filed in court. He said he had seen a pro-Trump businessman working with the experts in passing. She said they chatted for “five minutes at most” – she couldn’t remember the subject – and she left shortly afterwards to have an early dinner with her husband.
Surveillance video footage reviewed by The Washington Post shows Latham visited the elections office twice that day and stayed for more than four hours in total. She greeted the businessman, Scott Hall, when he arrived and led him to a back area to meet with experts and local officials, the video shows. throughout the day, sample, walked in and out of an area where experts from the forensic data firm, SullivanStrickler, were working, a part of that building that was not visible from the surveillance camera.
He took a selfie with one of the forensic experts before leaving leave at 18:19
Further examination found that elements of the account Latham gave in his statement about the events of January 6 and 7, 2021, appear to diverge from footage and other evidence, including depositions and text messages. Many of those records, including Latham’s Aug. 8 deposition, were filed in a long-running federal civil lawsuit involving election security in Georgia.
During the 2020 election and its aftermath, Latham served on the Georgia Republican Party’s executive committee and served on its Election Trust Task Force. She was also chair of the Coffee County Republican Party. She was one of the “fake voters” who signed unauthorized certificates in an attempt to keep Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.
In response to questions from The Post, Latham’s attorneys said, “Not accurately remembering the details of events nearly two years ago is not lying.” They have said that he was not involved in copying or anything improper or illegal.
His lawyers, Robert D. Cheeley and Holly A. Pierson, wrote in a court filing last week that the alleged security breach was “actually less of a criminal violation or engagement and more of a permissible exercise of the Board’s authority County Electoral”.
They wrote that “the parties involved clearly believed they had the authority to authorize it and the authority to do it, and that belief appears to be at least reasonable and probably accurate, negating any possible criminal intent.”
Surveillance footage shows Latham appearing to introduce SullivanStrickler’s team to local officials when they arrived that day. Then he saw them start looking at the county polling team, you see.
Cathy Latham, Chairwoman of the Coffee County, Ga. GOP. and digital forensics experts hired by lawyers allied with former President Trump on January 7, 2021. (Video: obtained by The Washington Post)
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and an Atlanta grand jury are investigating the incident in Coffee County, a Republican stronghold about 200 miles south of Atlanta. Federal and state prosecutors are also investigating the “fake voter” scheme, in which Latham and dozens of other Republicans in battleground states signed certificates proclaiming Trump the rightful victor.
The Coffee County episode is one of several alleged breaches of voting equipment since the 2020 election. In each case, Trump supporters, often with the help of sympathetic local officials, sought access to the equipment of voting to look for evidence that the elections were rigged.
Access to voting machines is often highly restricted, and some security analysts fear that such breaches, including copying voting software that is also used elsewhere, could expose the systems to hackers.
Details about what happened in Coffee County, including surveillance video reviewed by The Post, have come to light largely because of a lawsuit filed against Georgia by several voters and the nonprofit Coalition for Good government The plaintiffs they say the state’s voting system is unconstitutionally unsafe, which state officials deny. The plaintiffs have subpoenaed documents and testimony from several people, including Latham.
Sidney Powell, the Trump-allied attorney who was billed for the work, did not directly respond to The Post’s questions about Coffee County. “Previous reports of my involvement were seriously falsified,” he said in an email.
Records obtained by the plaintiffs show Powell signed contracts for the election work of forensic experts. SullivanStrickler’s team updated her by email on the work in Coffee County and billed her more than $26,000, records show.
Coffee County was among the few places across the country where Trump and his advisers pounced on minor errors or rumors of voting machine irregularities in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
After Coffee County Supervisor of Elections Misty Hampton raised concerns about Dominion’s voting systems machines at a Nov. 10 board of elections meeting, a campaign staff member of Trump sent him an email seeking information available under the public records law. The county refused to certify its results after a statewide recount on Nov. 30, claiming the machines showed inconsistent results. State investigators later concluded that the discrepancies had been caused by human error.
A local news outlet released a video featuring Hampton that purported to show how he could “spin” votes from one candidate to another. It went viral. The Trump team later cited Coffee County in its campaign to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
In her statement, Latham said that between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Jan. 6, after a full day’s work as a high school teacher, and as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol United States. — received a call from Hall, the businessman.
Hall had been “studying the election on behalf of the president,” Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer told Trump campaign officials on Nov. 20, 2020, in an email obtained by The Post. The email focused on problems with absentee ballots and did not mention Coffee County or voting machines.
In his statement, Latham said Hall asked him to connect him with Hampton. She didn’t know why and didn’t ask, she said.
“Because it had been an intense day. I hadn’t slept, I’d had all these things going on, I’d been getting phone calls and I was answering right. I was tired, I wanted to go home,” Latham said. She said she then briefly called Hampton to put her in touch with Hall.
“I would have called Misty and said, ‘Well, let me give you her email,'” Latham said, adding, “I sent her the email. That’s all I remember doing.”
New surveillance footage shows Latham and Hampton were in the office together during that time. Latham arrived at the office at 3.58pm and received at least three phone calls between 4pm and 4.40pm.
At 4:26 p.m., Hampton sent a text message to Eric Chaney, a member of the county board of elections that employs her, records show. “Scott Hall is on the phone with Cathy about wanting to come and scan our general election ballots as we discussed the other day,” he wrote.
Latham’s husband joined them in the office at 5 p.m., the footage shows, and later brought takeout. The Lathams and Hampton left the office shortly before 7:40 p.m
The next morning, Latham exchanged text messages with SullivanStrickler’s chief operating officer, Paul Maggio, as the team drove to Coffee County, records show, coordinating who would pick up Hall at the airport.
Latham also updated Hampton on the visitors’ movements.
“The team left Atlanta with 8.5 members led by Paul Maggio. Scott is flying,” Latham wrote to Hampton in a text message at 9:26 a.m
“Yay!!!!” Hampton replied.
In his statement, Latham said he was only passing along information that Hall asked him to share with Hampton. He said he didn’t know why Maggio and Hall were coming to Coffee County.
Latham said he also worked a full day at Coffee High School that day, Jan. 7, before briefly visiting the election office lobby after 4 p.m. for reasons unrelated to SullivanStrickler’s work. there.
Latham said he could see people behind the front desk, but he wasn’t paying attention to who they were and stood on the other side of the partition. “There were people in there and I feel uncomfortable when there are others,” he said.
External surveillance footage made public earlier this month showed Latham arriving at the office at 11:37 that day. Three SullivanStrickler employees arrived at the election office shortly thereafter. They were later joined by a fourth colleague. They intended to collect all the data they could from the county’s voting machines, emails and billing records.
Cheeley, Latham’s attorney, previously told The Post that Latham did not remember all the details of that day, but instead testified truthfully. He said he did remember visiting the office after school “to check on some runoff voter review panels” that had been held for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats earlier that week
Latham described himself to SullivanStrickler as an election official, a company executive said during a statement on behalf of the company this month. A lawyer for Latham said something must have been taken out of context or misunderstood…