It’s been more than three years since a team of Republican officials engaged in a covert operation to illegally access a rural Georgia county’s electronic elections system and appear to have made off with sensitive computer information — after briefing Donald Trump on aspects of that plan in the White House.
Yet no one — not the feds, not state elections officials, not even local law enforcement — has ascertained exactly what happened in Coffee County, Georgia, a rural patch of the politically deep red American South.
This Trump election scandal wasn’t a break-in: The head of the local Republican Party allowed a group of technicians into the one-story, windowless county elections office where they accessed government election servers and voting machines.
The incident was cited in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ case against Trump for election interference in Georgia; four of the key players in the Coffee County GOP elections operation have been criminally indicted, and two of them have already pleaded guilty.
But Willis’ indictment covers only a tiny part of the overarching scheme that is already getting lost in the shuffle. More than a dozen others involved who have already been identified by journalists and activists have yet to face any repercussions. Most importantly, Willis’ criminal case doesn’t promise answers anytime soon, given that the litigation is currently frozen on appeal. If Trump wins in November, the case will likely be on ice for another four years.
NOTUS has reviewed thousands of pages of court filings, investigative case files and transcripts from a related trial that track the total lack of action on an affair that calls into question the ability to secure election hardware and software, an episode that would otherwise seem supremely important on the eve of the 2024 election.
Yet, in the small city of Douglas, Georgia, an assembly of concerned citizens feels utterly forgotten.
“It’s important because we need to know all of the facts concerning the biggest election breach that I’ve ever heard of in the United States. We need the facts,” Olivia Coley-Pearson, a retired city commissioner who has become a voting rights activist, told NOTUS last week.
“We need to know exactly what happened, what are they planning to do — or have done — with this information. There’s just too many unanswered questions for me. It’s very risky,” she said.
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In an elections board meeting last week, locals in Coffee County decided to take action themselves. They plan to hire a lawyer. They don’t know if they even have the money to do it.
“We just wanted someone to get in there and clear it up, and see if they can find out information. Hopefully we’ll get some,” Paula Scott, the Coffee County elections board vice chair, told NOTUS on Friday.
Information has been hard to come by.
An investigation by the secretary of state now appears to have been utterly mishandled, with a cop refusing to make probing phone calls and a supervisor not following up on the matter, according to their own court testimony at a federal trial in January brought by a group of voting security activists in a case called Curling et al. v. Raffensperger. Court records show the inquiry remained dormant for 11 months, then intentionally held up for another five months while technicians analyzed a government computer server.
A subsequent probe by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took roughly another 11 months and has amounted to little. The agency belatedly produced a voluminous report that omitted key details and was torn apart by legal journalist Anna Bower, who concluded that it either “took an unduly narrow approach” or “did not conduct a thorough investigation.”
And at this point, that GBI report has sat for yet another 11 months at the state attorney general’s office without any criminal charges being filed — an agency led by AG Chris Carr, a Trump-supporting Republican who already refused to pursue a criminal case against the former president for trying to tamper with the votes there and recently petitioned to keep Trump on the presidential ballot in a fight before the U.S. Supreme Court.
After a pressure campaign from frustrated townspeople, the Coffee County elections board finally decided last week to hire what members called “an independent counsel.”
But board members aren’t clear whether they have the resources to do it. And the board chairman, Andy Thomas, was reluctant to promise that this hired lawyer would conduct any inquiry at all. Instead, Thomas suggested that the residents may have to do it themselves.
“My question is, you form your own independent counsel, answer these questions yourselves. You can adjudicate these answers as well as we can,” Thomas said.
“No, we can’t. We don’t have access,” said one stunned woman in the crowd.
“If I do it, it’s not independent,” a local attorney sitting in the audience chimed in.
“What could be done if the independent investigation is completed?” Thomas wondered aloud.
To do what Thomas is asking for has confounded residents. Details of the breach are strewn across a patchwork of documents, some not available in full.
They’d have to go through the findings of the House Jan. 6 committee (whose final report alone runs 845 pages), which touched briefly on the incident over the course of several depositions. There’s a mountain of documents uncovered by a seven-year voting security lawsuit against the state that, in its quest to probe Georgia’s elections systems, later unearthed details about the breach (a court file that includes more than 1,855 entries with the most recent one filed last Tuesday). There are also hints in a lengthy and partially redacted GBI report.
“He’s said that before. It’s laughable and infuriating,” Kathryn Grant, a rural voting advocate who attended the meeting, told NOTUS.
“How did this happen in the first place? How was it that a sophisticated and well-financed network of bad actors were able to walk into the board of elections multiple times and spend hours and hours and stay in Douglas? They had illegal access to the state’s voting software, to ballots, to voter information. How did that happen? And what can be done to mitigate the potential for this to be done again?” Grant asked.
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Immediately after Trump lost his November 2020 presidential reelection campaign, prominent MAGA lawyer L. Lin Wood Jr. hosted loyalists to discuss how to contest the results nationwide at the Tomotley Plantation, his 1,000-acre South Carolina property.
The guest list: criminally indicted conservative lawyer Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, disgraced general turned conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, and Doug Logan, whose cybersecurity firm, Cyber Ninjas, engaged in the partisan “audit” of Arizona’s 2020 election results and shut down when faced with public backlash and the threat of heavy fines.
Coffee County somehow came to the attention of some of Trump’s top legal bulldogs, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Powell. The woman who was then the chair of Coffee County’s Republican Party, Cathy Latham, previously said that she joined a Zoom call in December 2020 during which party officials wanted to better understand why the county would not certify a second recount.
Within days, Latham found herself on a trip to Washington, where she visited the White House and encountered Giuliani and Powell. Notably, Latham also stayed at the Willard Hotel — the same place that had been transformed into a MAGA “war room” in advance of Jan. 6. (Latham, who was also one of Trump’s fake electors in Georgia, maintained that she memorialized the trip in her diary.)
That’s about the time when Trump held the now infamous Dec. 18, 2020, meeting that a White House aide called “unhinged.” Powell, Byrne and Flynn met with the president at the Oval Office — until enraged advisers stepped in to thwart suggestions that Trump appoint Powell as a special prosecutor empowered to seize voting machines. Draft presidential orders specifically mentioned Coffee County. Giuliani would later tell congressional investigators that the White House team was accused of being too feeble to take the decisive action required for Trump.
On New Year’s Eve, Preston Haliburton, an Atlanta lawyer who’d hawked Trump’s claims of election fraud to state legislators, exchanged emails with Misty Hampton, then the Coffee County elections supervisor. Days earlier, Haliburton had met with Latham in Washington, according to an eye witness.
By then, an Atlanta computer forensics firm called SullivanStrickler, which Powell had hired to perform election denial work in Arizona and Michigan, had added Georgia to its list, according to a contract obtained by NOTUS between Trump campaign lawyer Jesse Binnall and the firm.
The next day, an “election integrity” attorney on Trump’s legal team named Katherine Friess texted an employee at the forensics firm touting how “we were granted access—by written invitation!—to the Coffee County Systens. Yay!”
On Jan. 7, a plane chartered by Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall arrived at Douglas Municipal Gene Chambers Airport, and a team of technicians was escorted into the Coffee County elections board offices, where they copied government computer systems in a fruitless search for nonexistent voter fraud.
In the years that followed, journalists have pieced together disparate facts — relying on leaked text messages, first-hand accounts, flight records and public records requests. The Washington Post even obtained surveillance footage of the team entering the elections department building.
However, no government entity has definitively explained how the plan was first hatched — or targeted the dozen-plus people who were involved. For example, in an interview, Hampton stated that former elections board member Eric Chaney helped coordinate the visit and was present as the team went through government computers. Chaney has yet to face any legal repercussions for his role in the matter. Chaney did not respond to a request for comment.
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During a federal trial in January — which was eclipsed by news of the Fulton DA’s romance scandal — voting security advocates forced the state’s elections officials to finally present testimony from the employees who first looked into the Coffee County breach.
The state had previously refused to turn over some internal files, citing “investigative privilege” and a deep concern that they would reveal “sources and methods” and “jeopardize” an “active” matter. However, inside U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg’s courtroom, it became clear that the office had barely taken any action at all.
When James A. Barnes Jr., took over as Coffee County elections supervisor in April 2021, he found the Cyber Ninjas CEO’s business card in the county’s offices. He escalated his finding up the chain. When the state elections agency’s chief investigator, Frances Watson, got involved, she told her team to “verify what, if any, contact Cyber Ninjas had with elections equipment.”
On the witness stand in federal court, Watson admitted that by the time she left the secretary of state’s office in November 2021, she still didn’t know anyone had gained unauthorized access to the equipment at Coffee County.
“Is that consistent with the way your office conducted elections security investigations while you were there, yes or no?” plaintiff attorney David Cross asked her.
After some poking, Watson relented that inaction “would be surprising to me.”
During that same trial on the previous day, transcripts show elections investigator Joshua Blanchard revealing that he had missed a key bit of evidence while he was visiting the rural elections department — crossing paths with a man who’d just exited Hampton’s office.
The man was carrying a backpack he didn’t have on his way in. Hampton’s office was directly connected to the office’s election management system server room. Blanchard didn’t bother to ask who the man was. It turns out that was Jeffrey Lenberg, a Trump-supporting election denier who would later be named in an investigation related to a similar voting machine breach in Michigan.
On the witness stand, Blanchard admitted that the Coffee County matter was assigned to an existing case file in April 2022, then given its own case number, but it was never actually investigated.
“At that particular time, we were told to hold off,” pending his office’s analysis of a Coffee County computer server, he testified. He didn’t make any phone calls to track down the alarming Cyber Ninjas connection, eventually handing the case over to the GBI in September 2022.
The testimony appeared to have surprised the judge.
“I just want to be clear,” Totenberg interjected. “When did you start doing any investigation?”
“I didn’t investigate. It was turned over to the GBI,” he responded.
Blanchard went on to admit that he didn’t follow up on the new Coffee County election supervisor’s attempt to track down his predecessor’s missing emails to see what she’d told the Cyber Ninjas.
In response to NOTUS’ inquiry, the secretary of state’s office stated for the first time publicly that it had quietly orchestrated Hampton’s removal from her job as Coffee County’s elections supervisor in early 2021 after she had irresponsibly posted a video on YouTube questioning the integrity of voting machines and revealing her government computer’s password. At the time, Hampton’s resignation was tied to allegations that she’d falsified time sheets as a pretext for her firing (though she said that she thought she was pushed out due to the video).
“We didn’t create this problem, but we know how to solve it — the moment we found out that bad actors had withheld evidence and gotten unauthorized access, we took immediate action and proactively replaced all voting equipment in Coffee County,” the state office spokesperson Mike Hassinger added in a statement. “We look forward to these individuals involved being held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”
When the secretary of state’s office passed the case to the GBI, investigators there discovered that Hampton had been in touch with Preston Haliburton, the Atlanta attorney who’d met with Latham in Washington and was also tied to Giuliani’s election overturning efforts in the Georgia Legislature.
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GBI turned over its full report to the state AG’s office on Aug. 21, 2023. Nelly Miles, an agency spokesperson, directed NOTUS to the prosecutorial office because “the GBI completed the case and provided findings to the AG’s office.” However, she said the agency would not confirm the details of the report because “the case is still open.”
Meanwhile, the AG’s office said the file remains with its prosecution division. Agency spokesperson Kara Murray called it “still an active matter.”
That said, John Monro, the defense attorney representing Hampton, told NOTUS he is “not aware” of any ongoing investigation other than Willis’ case against Trump and alleged co-conspirators.
Coley-Pearson, the former Douglas commissioner now pushing for an independent investigation, is frustrated that the local DA — who previously tried and failed to prosecute her for helping a young woman understand how to use a voting machine — hasn’t stepped up either.
The Waycross Circuit district attorney did not respond to several calls and emails asking why her office hasn’t filed criminal charges against the others involved in the breach, despite exasperated calls from residents for her to take action.
The office is led by Marilyn Bennett, a first-term DA who ran as a Republican in 2022. Her Instagram account includes a September 2019 post — which she tagged “#maga” — that features her at a “Women for Trump” event at a Bonefish Grill restaurant in St. Simons Island hosted by “Team Trump” and U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, a congressman who would later refuse to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The Coffee County elections board’s decision voted 3 to 2 to hire an independent counsel.
Matthew McCullough, one of the two board members who voted against the measure, balked at residents’ calls for an investigation. When asked to help release more missing evidence, he complained about having to read through legal paperwork.
“I read quickly, but dang, I’d rather read a novel or a Bible,” he remarked.
When the small crowd asked for clarification on whether a hired independent lawyer would engage in a full-on investigation, McCullough tried to assert that any independent counsel would only “represent the board,” no further promises.
“You’re saying ‘investigation.’ That was not his motion,” he stressed.
McCullough refused to answer questions from NOTUS sent last week.
“Coffee County is an example of, essentially, a good ol’ boys network that permeates the government institutions. It’s a small town,” Grant, the other activist, told NOTUS. “There’s one news outlet. It’s dominated by the local political voice, which is essentially on the side of Trump.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.