Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling testified before the January 6 Committee today. But the most shocking testimony came from former Fulton County elections worker Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby “Lady Ruby” Freeman, who have been hounded into seclusion by pro-Trump hooligans.
Moss and Freeman, along with Moss’ grandmother and son, were targeted by former President Donald Trump and his followers after former Presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani lied that the women were passing USB drives to each other like “vials of heroin or cocaine” during the November 3, 2020 ballot count:
Here’s the clip. “Passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” pic.twitter.com/9xN6aexjlJ
— Brendan Keefe (@BrendanKeefe) December 10, 2020
A visibly shaken Moss told the panel her mother had given her “a ginger mint.”
Later, her boss called her into the office and told her to check her Facebook Messenger, something Moss rarely did. When she opened the app, she found numerous hateful and racist messages attacking her: “Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”
Her bosses warned her to check on her mother.
Then strangers banged on her grandmother’s door. When her grandmother opened it, Moss testified, strangers burst inside, claiming they were there to make a citizen’s arrest and demanding to know where Moss and Freeman were.
Then huge numbers of pizzas were sent to her grandmother’s house—pizzas her grandmother never ordered—with the delivery drivers demanding payment.
Moss said she blamed herself for putting her family in danger by doing the job she had loved for ten years. She told the committee that she no longer leaves her home, not even to go to the grocery store, and that she has put on 60 pounds.
Freeman, the proud owner of her own fashion shop, testified that she will no longer wear the shirt of her own design because she had worn it on Election Night. She’s afraid to use her real name, as is Moss.
Trump singled out Freeman, calling her “a professional vote scammer and hustler.”
Freeman said, “”There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you?”
Raffensperger and Sterling reiterated the details of the recount, risk limiting audit, and hand recount; the debunked claims by Giuliani and Trump about “suitcases full of ballots” in State Farm Arena that actually were ballots in secure ballot transport boxes; and the details of the 67-minute phone call, during which Trump repeatedly tried to bully Raffensperger and other Georgia officials into “finding” enough votes for Trump to beat President-Elect Joe Biden.
“The numbers are the numbers,” Raffensperger, an engineer by training, said. “The numbers don’t lie.”
Sterling was praised for calling out Trump directly during a Gold Dome press conference. He testified that a project manager from Dominion, a woman who had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and who holds a master’s from MIT, called and sounded “audibly shaken.” Sterling said she was upset about QAnon adherent threatening a young poll worker with an online image of a swinging noose.
“I lost my temper,” Sterling said. He asked Raffensperger’s permission to hold the press conference and addressed Trump directly, insisting that the President stop his followers’ violent rhetoric: “Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get killed.”
But Trump was hung up on the State Farm Arena video, only part of which Giuliani presented. The video clip, taken from 48 hours of footage, left out the full sequence of events when Fulton County elections workers first shut down the count and locked up the ballots in the secure bins under their work tables, then were told to resume the count at Raffensperger’s order. He added that WSB-TV’s Justin Gray had gone through all the footage with state investigators.
Sterling also debunked Trump’s claims that stacks of absentee ballots were repeatedly run through scanners to inflate the count for Biden. He explained that sometimes only three or four ballots go through the high-speed scanner. The count for that batch has to be deleted manually, then the stack is loaded back into the high-speed scanner and run again to be sure all the ballots are counted.
“There were many Republicans in the 2016 and the 2020 race that just couldn’t push that button” for Trump, Sterling said. He told the committee that about 30,000 voters did not cast a vote in the Presidential election, but voted for the rest of the Republican candidates down ballot.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asked Sterling how his tweeting factual information about the election compared to Trump’s huge platform. He replied that it was frustrating, but that he felt the information was getting out.
He then noted that “even family members” who were pro-Trump were not swayed even when presented with evidence debunking Trump’s false claims about the election.
“The problem is that you have to get into people’s hearts,” Sterling explained. He testified that he had shown an attorney several pieces of evidence.
At the end, the attorney said, “I just know in my heart they cheated.”
Like Moss, Freeman, and their family, Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testified that Trump backers harassed them and their families, with hateful texts, loud demonstrations outside their homes, even breaking into Raffensberger’s daughter-in-law’s house. All this was going on after the death of Raffensperger’s son and while Bowers’ daughter was “gravely ill.”
Bowers testified that Giuliani and Trump had called him “multiple times” looking for votes and alleging that 200,000 people had voted illegally and 5,000 votes had been cast in the names of dead people. Trump’s team also repeatedly pressured him to call a special session of the Arizona Legislature to decertify the slate of electors for Biden and replace them with a bogus Trump slate. Similar illegitimate elector slates were pushed in several other states, including Georgia.
But Bowers said his oath and his religious faith dictated that he not break the law. He and other Arizona officials pushed back, asking for evidence—specifically, names of the alleged bogus voters. Trump’s team repeatedly promised to hand those over but never did.
Bowers said Trump attorney John Eastman told him, “Just do it and let the courts sort it out.”
He said he told Eastman, “You’re asking me to do something that’s never been done in the history of the United States, to put my state through that, without sufficient evidence?”
And he refused to break his oath to the Constitutions of the United States and Arizona.
He also refused to sign a letter in support of decertifying the elector slate. Eastman read from a journal entry around that time, saying he could not do something cowardly and then stand before God.
He said the whole thing made him think of the 1970s mob sendup The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, except that “This was a tragic parody.”
Then the harassment amped up.
Bowers, who had backed Trump, got more than 20,000 e-mails and tens of thousands of voicemails and texts at work, to the point where he could not communicate.
At home, it was worse. On Saturdays, protestors circle his house with video panel trucks that “call me a pedophile, a pervert, a corrupt politician, blaring loudspeakers, handing out literature on my and my neighbors’ property.”
He described but would not name the Three Percenter group.
“One gentleman that had the three bars on his chest and had a pistol verbally threatened my neighbor,” Bowers said. “When I saw the gun, I knew I had to get close. My daughter, who was gravely ill, was upset by what happened outside.”
He also spoke of “my valiant wife, a very strong, very quiet woman,” as tears came to his eyes.
“So it was disturbing. It was disturbing.”
Raffensperger reiterated that his e-mail address and cell phone had been “doxxed”—that is, made public for the purpose of people harassing him—and that his wife had been subjected to numerous “sexualized texts…that were disgusting.” Because his daughter-in-law is now a widow with two children, he said they were particularly worried after someone broke into her home.
Schiff asked Raffensperger why he didn’t quit.
“Because I follow the law,” he said. “Sometimes you are required to stand up and take the shots. That’s all we did.”
He added, “At the end, President Trump came up short.”
