By Todd Lassa
Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who warned Donald J. Trump on December 7, 2020 to “stop inspiring” his followers to violence against election officials who didn’t back the Big Lie, told the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection he thought his department’s message was getting through to the public. Poll workers counting ballots at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County did not pull out 12,000 ballots for Joe Biden from under their table. The ballots were placed into ballot carriers under the desk by the workers “in plain view” of election monitors and the press.
“And what’s really frustrating is the president’s attorney had the same videotape,” but that attorney, Rudy Giuliani, tried to pass it off as massive fraud in a meeting with Georgia state senators. “It was frustrating, but at the same time I thought the message was getting out,” Sterling told the 1/6 panel’s public hearing Tuesday under questioning by committee member Adam Schiff (D-CA).
But still, Sterling got pushback from Trump supporters, including members of his own family. And this is where the whole committee and its hearings runs into a wall.
“The problem you had was getting to people’s hearts,” Sterling said. Quoting unconvinced MAGA supporters; “’I just know in my heart that those people just cheated.’”
Whether the four public hearings so far have changed any minds is hard to determine, although Trump may be finally feeling some heat.
“Unfortunately, a bad decision was made. This committee – it was a bad decision not to have representation on this committee,” Trump told right-wing podcast host Wayne Allen Root Monday, per the New York Daily News. Referring to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s refusal to set up a bipartisan committee, “That was a very, very foolish decision.”
It's hard, although perhaps not impossible, to imagine how a pro-Trump Republican Congress member like Ohio’s Jim Jordan would counter the testimony of Sterling, his boss Raffensperger, Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives Russell Bowers or Tuesday’s final witness, former Fulton County election worker Wandrea ArShaye Moss who, with her mother Ruby Freeman, are seen in the television news video counting ballots at State Farm Arena past midnight that November 3.
Moss said the best part of her job was helping older voters cast their ballots, especially during the pandemic, and she relished getting absentee ballots out to young students who were away at college on election day. But in the 67-minute call with Raffensperger in which he asked the secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes, Trump called out Moss by name 18 times.
When her supervisors advised Moss to check her seldom-used Facebook account, she found death threats, threats she would go to jail along with her mother, and a message to “be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”
“A lot were racist. A lot were just hateful. … I just felt it was my fault for putting my family in this position,” including her grandmother, who faced mobs who forced their way into her house.
Online attacks, doxing and death threats by Trump supporters also extended to Sterling, Raffensperger, and Arizona state speaker Bowers, who also took a call from Trump after the November 2020 presidential election. According to the committee, a staffer from Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) office offered to deliver fake electors directly to Pence from Wisconsin and Michigan. [Johnson’s office denied the account.]
Schiff Tuesday produced a statement Trump put out in which the former president called Bowers a “RINO” after claiming Bowers told Trump the election was rigged and that he won.
“I did have a conversation [with Trump] but that was not it. Anywhere, anyone, anytime someone would say I said the election was rigged, that is not true,” Bowers responded.
Trump and his team wanted Bowers to get the Arizona House to go along with a plan to provide “alternate” electors in Washington January 6. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said, “we’ve got lots of theories” of voter fraud, “we just don’t have the evidence…”
“I just don’t know whether that was a gaffe,” Bowers said of Giuliani’s admission.
Bowers told Trump, Giuliani, and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who also pressured him to decertify electors for Biden, that his oath made it impossible for him to do so. Bowers quoted Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address in which he called out how special it is that the U.S. allows its citizens to choose its leaders, and transfers power peacefully. “I have a lot of admiration for him,” Bowers said of Reagan.
“The fact that we allow an election, support an election, and move on without disturbance and we choose to follow the will of the people – it means a lot to me and I know it meant a lot to him.”
That’s from the heart, too.
(WED 6/22/22)