At the Select House Committee hearings,  Gabriel Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer, at the Secretary of State’s Office in Georgia described how Trump’s legal team misled the American public about video tapes he had seen and they saw about the carriers that had been packed into carriers in plain view of everyone. As Sterling said,

“what is really frustrating is the president and his attorneys had this same video tape. They saw the exact same things the rest of us could see and they chose to mislead state Senators and the public about what was on that video….it [their mischaracterization] was obviously untrue, they knew it was untrue and they continued to do things like this”.

 

Of course, Sterling was a lonely voice in Georgia competing against what Schiff called the huge megaphone of the president of the United States who used it to spread massive amounts of misinformation. Trying to counter the misinformation, Sterling testified, “was like a shovel trying to empty the ocean.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a long time Republican,  was not famous before the presidential election of 2020. He is famous now. That is all thanks to president Donald Trump and his slightly more than an hour long telephone call with him where the president tried to strong arm Raffensperger to overturn the lawful election by “finding him” about nearly 12,000 votes.  As if they could be plucked out of the air.

At the Select Committee Hearing of June 20, 2022 Adam Schiff asked him point blank who won the 2020 presidential election. Raffensperger was in charge of the election and he replied without hesitation,  “Joseph Biden won.” He was also asked if he had voted for Trump and whether he had been a supporter of Trump. He said he had been a supporter and voted for him. Clearly, he was not biased in favour of Biden.

His office conducted a machine recount, a forensic audit and a full hand recount of the election which had been won by Biden by nearly 12,000 votes. That was admittedly a narrow victory. But it was much more than could possibly have been overturned on a recount. Raffensperger confirmed that they literally recounted every one of the 5 million ballots that had been cast. Raffensperger said “the recount came remarkably close to the original count…3 counts all remarkably close and all showing that Trump lost the election.”

That did not stop or even slow down president Trump and his team from making numerous allegations of voter false fraud in Georgia .  Raffensperger and Sterling of course had to address those allegations that Trump and his team were making. That was their job and they performed it. Raffensperger became the spokesperson in response to the false claims by the Trump team that were having an effect on election workers and the general public.

Mr. Sterling told the president directly that he had the right to appeal the decision to the courts, but he bravely said to him,

“you don’t have the ability to say–and you need to step up and say this–stop trying to inspire people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s gonna get hurt; someone’s gonna get shot; someone gonna get killed. And it’s not right.”

 

That day Sterling said that an official with Dominion Voting Machines had been threatened by some QAnon supporters. These were Trumpsters. Sterling went to Twitter to read the tweet. The tweet to the representative from Dominion said “You’ve committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul.” It showed a twisted noose. And for lack of a better word, Sterling said,  “I lost it. I got irate.” He had seen many such statements on social media of similar character but this one threw him over the edge.

He and his supervisor decided to call Secretary of State Raffensperger and all agreed that they had to make a statement about the rhetoric that had gone too far. Of course, there is no evidence that Trump ever counselled his supporters to avoid violence or violent rhetoric just as he did not at first and for many hours say that on January 6, 2020.

Instead, later that day, Trump tweeted, after he had been told there was no fraud, “There was massive voter fraud in Georgia.” Sterling agreed with Schiff that this was “just plain false.”

The next day on December 2, 2020 president Trump again issued a video where he made false claims about voter fraud in Georgia: “They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack. All against me.”  That was not only false, it was incendiary. He was pouring fuel on a fire in Georgia, where emotions were running high among Trump supporters who were being told the election had been stolen by the Democrats.

As Adam Schiff told the hearing, 2 days after Sterling’s emotional appeal to Trump to stop inciting violence,

“2 representatives of Donald Trump appeared in Georgia, including Rudy Giuliani and launched a new conspiracy theory that would take on a life of its own and threatened the lives of several innocent election workers. This story falsely alleged that some time on election night, election workers at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta Georgia kicked out poll observers. After the poll observers left, the story goes, these workers pulled suitcases of ballots from under a table and ran those ballots counting machines multiple times, completely without evidence. Trump and his allies claimed that these suitcases contained 18,000 ballots all for Joe Biden. None of this was true. Rudy Giuliani appeared before the Georgia State Senate, played a surveillance video from State Farm Arena falsely claiming that it showed this conspiracy taking place.”

 

Here is a sample of what Mr. Giuliani had to say at that hearing:

“And when you saw what we saw on the video which to me was a smoking gun. A powerful smoking gun. I don’t have to be a genius to figure out what happened. I don’t have to be genius to figure out that those votes are not legitimate votes. You don’t put legitimate votes under a table and wait until you throw the opposition out and in the middle of the night count them. You would have to be fools to think that.”

 

President Trump’s campaign amplified Mr. Giuliani’s false claims in a tweet pushing out the footage. Mr. Giuliani likewise pushed out his claims on social media. As you can see from his tweet he said, “It is now beyond doubt Fulton County Democrats had stolen the election.” Later in this hearing we will hear from one of these workers about the effect that these lies had on her and her family.

Sterling confirmed that the election officials in his office reviewed the entire 48-hour surveillance tape of the proceedings at State Farm Arena. This was much more than the short excerpt Giuliani showed the Senate Committee.

The conspiracy theorists had conflated a water main brake that did not exist, and other things, but as Sterling said,

“what it actually showed, election workers engaging in normal ballot processing…one of the frustrating things was the so-called suitcase of ballots, from under the table. If you watch the entirety of the video, you saw that these were election workers who were under the impression that they would get to go home at around 10-10:30. People were putting on their coats. People were putting ballots that were prepared to be scanned into ballot carriers that are sealed with a  tamper proof seal so that they are not messed with. It’s an interesting thing because there are 4 screens with the video, and as you are watching this you can see the election monitors with the press as you see these ballot carriers place under the table. You see it…later the official is told they have to keep on counting. You see everybody take their coats off, and pull the ballots out…The secondary thing you see is that a ballot scan goes through and a batch will be taken off and they will be run through again. This is a standard operating procedure. If there is a mis-scan, a misalignment if it doesn’t read right, these are high speed high capacity scanners, so 3 or 4 will go through after  a mis-scan and to delete that batch and put it back through again, and by going through a hand tally as the Secretary pointed out, we showed that there had been multiple ballots scanned without a corresponding physical ballot, your counts would have been a lot higher than the ballots themselves, and with the hand tally we saw that 2 specific numbers had been met. The hand tally got us to a .1053 % of the total votes cast and .009% on the margin which is essentially dead on accurate. Most academic studies will show that between a hand tally you will have between 1% and 2% but because we used ballot marking devices where it’s very clear what the voter intended. It is a lot easier to conduct the hand count and it showed that none of that was true. “

 

In other words, as Trump’s own Attorney General had said, all the Trump team claims of voter fraud, at least in Georgia were all “bullshit.”

 On December 7, 2020 Gabriel Sterling held a press briefing.  This is part of what he said:

“I am going to move on to what I call “Disinformation Monday.” Many of you saw the video tape of what happened at State Farm Arena. I spent hours with our post certification investigators…I spent hours going over this video to explain to people that what you saw–the “secret suitcase with ‘magic ballots’ which actually were ballots that had been patched into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in plain view of the monitors and the press. And what’s really frustrating is the president’s attorneys had this same video tape. They saw exactly the same things the rest of us could see, and they chose to mislead state Senators and the public about what was on that video.”

 

Trump’s own Attorney General William Barr and Bjay Pak from the Department of Justice reviewed the same tapes and came to exactly the same conclusion as the Georgia Republicans had done. And that was that the Trump team allegations were bogus. Now we all know how rare such agreement is in the United States where Republicans and Democrats can rarely agree on what day it is, but they actually agreed that Trump and his legal team were not telling the truth about that video. Barr said, “We took a hard look at this ourselves and …The Fulton Country allegations had no merit.”

 

Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue specifically told Trump that his allegations were false. Donoghue said “He kept fixating on the suitcases which presumably had fraudulent ballots and the suitcase that had been rolled out from under the table and I told him, ‘No sir there are no suitcases. You can watch the video over and over again. There is no suitcase. There was a wheeled bin where they kept ballots.”

 

As Adam Schiff  the Democratic Congressman summed up a the Hearing:

“No matter how often senior Department of Justice officials including his own Attorney General told the president these allegations were not true, president Trump kept promoting these lies and putting pressure on state officials to accept them.” 

Yet 4 years later Trump continues to spew the same lies about a stolen election in Georgia, even though at the Hearings Trump’s own people exposed his lies.