\n<\/p>\n
Damning emails and text messages connecting Trump\u2019s legal team with a January 2021 voting system breach in Georgia have been discovered by Atlanta-area prosecutors, according to a bombshell CNN report<\/a> published on Sunday.<\/p>\n The revelation comes as Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis<\/strong> is expected to file indictments against former President Donald Trump<\/strong> and his allies for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which would bring the number of criminal indictments faced by the former president and current GOP frontrunner to four.<\/p>\n At the center of the scheme in Coffee County, a rural area where Trump carried 70% of the vote, is a local elections official named Misty Hampto<\/strong>n, who claimed in a November 2020 elections board meeting that the state\u2019s new Dominion-made voting machines could \u201cvery easily\u201d be manipulated. That comment immediately piqued the interest of the Trump campaign, which asked Hampton for \u201cas much information as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n The November elections board meeting \u201cset off an extraordinary sequence of events that plunged the GOP enclave into the middle of a multistate effort by prominent Trump allies to gain access to voting machines in search of purported evidence that the election was rigged,\u201d The Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a> last year. Those events culminated on January 7, when local election officials and GOP allies let pro-Trump operatives<\/a> into the Coffee County elections office, where they \u201cimaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment.\u201d<\/p>\n But the extent of Trump lawyers\u2019 involvement in the scheme has previously been unreported.\u00a0<\/p>\n A key moment came on New Year’s Day, when a lawyer working with Rudy Giuliani<\/strong>, Sidney Powell<\/strong> and other Trump allies shared a \u201cwritten invitation\u201d provided by Hampton that purportedly gave them permission to examine the county\u2019s voting systems. The lawyer also provided what she called the \u201cLetter of invitation to Coffee County, Georgia\u201d to Bernie Kerik<\/strong>, a former NYPD commissioner who was working with Giuliani to try to find evidence of voter fraud.<\/p>\n Previous reporting has linked the breach to Powell, but this latest revelation appears to tie Giuliani much more directly to the scheme. \u201cRudy Giuliani had nothing to do with this,\u201d his attorney Robert Costello<\/strong> told CNN. \u201cYou can\u2019t attach Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell\u2019s crackpot idea.\u201d CNN\u2019s investigation cites text messages that contradict this defense. \u201cJust landed back in DC with the Mayor huge things starting to come together!\u201d an employee from Sullivan Strickler, a law firm hired by Powell to scrutinize Coffee County\u2019s voting system, wrote in a group chat on January 1. (Messages in the group consistently referred to Giuliani as \u201cthe Mayor\u201d.) \u201cMost immediately, we were just granted access \u2013 by written invitation! \u2013 to Coffee County\u2019s systems. Yay!\u201d the text continued.<\/p>\n Trump himself was likely aware of at least some of what was going on in Coffee County. During a now-infamous<\/a> December 18, 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, Trump was presented with a draft executive order to seize voting machines that explicitly cited Coffee County. In the meeting, Giuliani referenced a scheme to acquire \u201cvoluntary access\u201d to Georgia voting systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n