[Reuters] Inside Trump's campaign to demonize election workers

Read at the link. Trump's attack on our election is a main reason why the US is named a 'backsliding democracy' for the first time.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-threats-georgia/

Desperate to overturn his election loss, Donald Trump and his team spun a sprawling voter-fraud fiction, casting two rank-and-file election workers, a mother and her daughter, as the main villains. The women endured months of death threats and racist taunts – and one went into hiding.

This story contains offensive language.

As Donald Trump’s campaign sought to overturn his shocking loss of the state of Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, it hatched a conspiracy theory.

At its center were two masterminds: a clerical worker in a county election office, and her mom, who had taken a temporary job to help count ballots. The alleged plot: Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and mother Ruby Freeman cheated Trump by pulling fake ballots from suitcases hidden under tables at a ballot-counting center. In early December, the campaign began raining down allegations on the two Black women.

Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, falsely claimed that video footage showed the women engaging in “surreptitious illegal activity” and acting suspiciously, like drug dealers “passing out dope.” In early January, Trump himself singled out Freeman, by name, 18 times in a now-famous call in which he pressed Georgia officials to alter the state’s results. He called the 62-year-old temp worker a “professional vote scammer,” a “hustler” and a “known political operative” who “stuffed the ballot boxes.”

Freeman made a series of 911 emergency calls in the days after she was publicly identified in early December by the president’s camp. In a Dec. 4 call, she told the dispatcher she’d gotten a flood of “threats and phone calls and racial slurs,” adding: “It’s scary because they’re saying stuff like, ‘We’re coming to get you. We are coming to get you.’”

Two days later, a panicked Freeman called 911 again, after hearing loud banging on her door just before 10 p.m. Strangers had come the night before, too. She begged the dispatcher for assistance. “Lord Jesus, where’s the police?” she asked, according to the recording, obtained by Reuters in a records request. “I don’t know who keeps coming to my door.”

“Please help me.”

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The story of Moss and Freeman shows how some of the top members of the Trump camp – including the incumbent president himself – conducted an intensive effort to publicly demonize individual election workers in the pursuit of overturning the election.

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Related:

Two Georgia election workers sue far-right website over false fraud allegations
https://www.reuters.com/business/me...site-over-false-fraud-allegations-2021-12-02/

 

AP continues to do their investigation and reporting on targets against election workers

Pro-Trump news site targets election workers, inspiring wave of menace (reuters.com)

The Gateway Pundit, which started as a tiny opinion blog, saw readership surge to nearly 50 million views a month as it amplified Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims. Reuters documented the impact: 25 election workers targeted by more than 100 violent threats or hostile messages citing the Pundit.

This story contains offensive language.

The story had a bombshell headline: “Thousands of fake votes” had been discovered in Madison, Wisconsin, two weeks after Democrat Joe Biden narrowly beat then-President Donald Trump in the state.

The bogus report from the far-right website Gateway Pundit drew attention to a set of initials – MLW – inscribed on what it claimed were “fake” ballots. Then a reader posted a comment on the story correctly identifying MLW: Maribeth L. Witzel-Behl, the Madison city clerk, whose duties include administering elections.

Other commenters soon called for Witzel-Behl’s execution. She found one post especially unnerving. It recommended a specific bullet for killing her – a 7.62 millimeter round for an AK-47 assault rifle.

Witzel-Behl was stunned by the threats and the angry calls that poured into her office. Contrary to the story’s insinuation that the initials meant the ballots were fake, in reality she and her staff wrote her initials on all absentee ballots, before they were given to voters, as a matter of policy.

Witzel-Behl is among 25 election officials and workers targeted by more than 100 threatening and hostile communications that have cited the Gateway Pundit since last year’s election, according to a Reuters review of the materials, which included emails, letters and phone messages, as well as comments posted on the website’s stories.

The messages targeted officials and staff in four jurisdictions that featured repeatedly in false or misleading Pundit reports on voter-fraud claims: the Wisconsin cities of Madison and Milwaukee; Fulton County, Georgia; and Maricopa County, Arizona.

At least five of the officials, including Witzel-Behl, received threats they considered serious enough to report to law enforcement. Among those targeted were a municipal election director in Milwaukee and a Republican supervisor in Maricopa County. The targets also included Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a mother and daughter who staffed a ballot counting operation in Fulton County; their ordeal was detailed this week by Reuters.

After Gateway Pundit ran an Aug. 14 story about them, a commenter posted below the piece: “The two women are traitors to the country and should be hung by the neck until dead.”

Two additional officials, a Fulton County election commissioner and another Maricopa county supervisor, blamed the Gateway Pundit for inciting serious threats of violence they received after the site implicated the officials in baseless claims of election-rigging. Those threats did not reference the website by name.

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“People are going to be coming and visiting the homes of the board of supervisors and basically executing their families. Should be fun.”

VOICEMAIL LEFT FOR MARICOPA COUNTY SUPERVISOR CLINT HICKMAN

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Threats of hanging and shooting

Days after the election, Gateway Pundit posted a false story that targeted election officials in Rock County, Wisconsin, about an hour south of Madison.

The site reported that a software glitch led to 10,000 votes being “moved” from Trump to Biden “in just one Wisconsin county.” Such glitches, it said, were a Democratic scheme to “steal” the race.

That article was tweeted by Eric Trump, the former president’s son. He did not respond to an interview request sent through the former president’s office.

In reality, the vote count never changed. The Associated Press had made an error in an election-results table it published and quickly corrected it.

The next morning, County Clerk Lisa Tollefson got a call about the story around 7 a.m. and raced to work, finding the phone lines jammed with enraged Trump voters yelling at her staff. The furor lasted four days, and “was bad enough that we let the sheriff know, and he put protection on us,” Tollefson said.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 28, the Gateway Pundit turned its sights on Maribeth Witzel-Behl, the clerk in Madison, Wisconsin, whose initials appeared on the thousands of absentee ballots that the Pundit had wrongly characterized as “fake.”

Concerned by the story’s inaccuracies and the threats they provoked, she consulted with City Attorney Michael Haas, who sent Hoft an email requesting the Pundit correct the piece and remove the threatening comments.

“If there are additional threats or actual harassment against our employees we will be holding you accountable,” Haas wrote.

The next day, the story was updated: The references to “fake votes” were changed to “suspect votes.” All the comments also were removed from the page. The story was marked as “updated,” but contained no correction.

Joe Hoft, the brother of site founder Jim Hoff, wrote a follow-up story about Haas’s warning. Haas, he asserted, was attacking the Pundit’s free-speech rights.

“We found the City Attorney’s response threatening,” he wrote.

 

Kanye West publicist pressed Georgia election worker to confess to bogus fraud charges | Reuters

ATLANTA, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Weeks after the 2020 election, a Chicago publicist for hip-hop artist Kanye West traveled to the suburban home of Ruby Freeman, a frightened Georgia election worker who was facing death threats after being falsely accused by former President Donald Trump of manipulating votes. The publicist knocked on the door and offered to help.

The visitor, Trevian Kutti, gave her name but didn’t say she worked for West, a longtime billionaire friend of Trump. She said she was sent by a “high-profile individual,” whom she didn’t identify, to give Freeman an urgent message: confess to Trump’s voter-fraud allegations, or people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.

Freeman refused. This story of how an associate of a music mogul pressured a 62-year-old temporary election worker at the center of a Trump conspiracy theory is based on previously unreported police recordings and reports, legal filings, and Freeman’s first media interview since she was dragged into Trump’s attempt to reverse his election loss.

Kutti did not respond to requests for comment. Her biography for her work at the Women’s Global Initiative, a business networking group, identifies her as a member of “the Young Black Leadership Council under President Donald Trump.” It notes that in September 2018, she “was secured as publicist to Kanye West” and “now serves as West’s Director of Operations.”

When Kutti knocked on Freeman's door on Jan. 4, Freeman called 911. By then, Freeman said, she was wary of strangers.

Starting on Dec. 3, Trump and his campaign repeatedly accused Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, of illegally counting phony mail-in ballots after pulling them from mysterious suitcases while working on Election Day at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. In fact, the “suitcases” were standard ballot containers, and the votes were properly counted, county and state officials quickly confirmed, refuting the fraud claims.

But Trump and his allies continued to accuse Freeman and Moss of election-rigging. The allegations inspired hundreds of threats and harassing messages against them and their family members.

By the time Kutti arrived, Freeman needed help but was cautious and wouldn’t open the door because of the threats, according to Freeman and a police report.

So Freeman asked a neighbor to come over and talk with Kutti, who was with an unidentified male. Like Freeman, Kutti and the other visitor were Black. Kutti told the neighbor that Freeman was in danger and that she’d been sent to provide assistance. Freeman said she was open to meeting them. She asked Cobb County Police to send an officer to keep watch so she could step outside, according to a recording of her 911 call.

“They’re saying that I need help,” Freeman told the dispatcher, referring to the people at her door, “that it’s just a matter of time that they are going to come out for me and my family.”

An officer arrived and spoke with Kutti, who described herself as a “crisis manager,” according to the police incident report.

Kutti repeated that Freeman “was in danger” and had “48 hours” before “unknown subjects” turned up at her home, the report said. At the officer’s suggestion, the women agreed to meet at a police station. The officer’s report did not identify the man accompanying Kutti.

'YOU’RE A LOOSE END'

Inside the station, Kutti and Freeman met in a corner, according to footage from a body camera worn by an officer present at the meeting. Reuters obtained the video through a public-records request.

“I cannot say what specifically will take place,” Kutti is heard telling Freeman in the recording. “I just know that it will disrupt your freedom," she said, "and the freedom of one or more of your family members.”

“You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” Kutti continued. She added that “federal people” were involved, without offering specifics.

According to Freeman, Kutti told her that she was going to put a man named “Harrison Ford” on speakerphone. (Freeman said the man on the phone wasn’t the actor by the same name.) Kutti said the man had “authoritative powers to get you protection,” the bodycam footage shows.

At that point, Kutti can be heard asking the officer to give them privacy. The body camera did not capture a clear recording of the conversation that followed after the officer moved away from the two women.

Kutti and the man on the speakerphone, over the next hour, tried to get Freeman to implicate herself in committing voter fraud on Election Day. Kutti offered legal assistance in exchange, Freeman said.

“If you don't tell everything,” Freeman recalled Kutti saying, “you're going to jail.”

Growing suspicious, Freeman said she jumped up from her chair and told Kutti: “The devil is a liar,” before calling for an officer.

Later at home, Freeman said, she Googled Kutti’s name and discovered she was a Trump supporter.

Police say they did not investigate the incident further.

West, who changed his name in October to “Ye,” did not respond to requests for comment sent through another publicist who represents him.

Reuters could not independently confirm whether Kutti still works for West, or in what capacity.

Media reports have cited her association with the rapper since 2018, when she ceased working with R. Kelly, an R&B singer who was convicted in September of racketeering and sex-trafficking charges. Kutti's biography says she is the founder of Trevian Worldwide, a media and entertainment advisory firm with offices in four cities. Among her clients, she says, are boxer Terence Crawford and Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan.

The meeting took place two months after West ended a failed bid for the White House that drew media attention when several publications revealed that allies and supporters of Trump were working on the ground to advance West’s campaign. Some Democrats said they regarded West’s presidential bid as a ruse to siphon off Black votes from Democrat Joe Biden. Groups assisting the rapper’s campaign denied that charge.

On Jan. 5, the day after Freeman's meeting with Kutti, an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation called Freeman and urged her to leave her home of 20 years because it wasn’t safe, Freeman said.

The following day, Jan. 6, Kutti’s prediction that people would descend on Freeman’s home in 48 hours proved correct, according to a defamation lawsuit Freeman and Moss filed last week against a far-right news site. Freeman, the lawsuit said, left hours before a mob of angry Trump supporters surrounded her home, shouting through bullhorns.

 

He was President. Presidents are above the law, literally protected from defamation.