ATLANTA — Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, BJay Pak, told the Jan. 6 Committee that both he and the FBI found no evidence of massive voter fraud during the November 2020 election.
He went on say that former President Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, made false statements to a Georgia state Senate hearing regarding a controversial video showing Fulton County elections workers pulling a ballot box from under a table.
This is the first time we’ve heard directly from Pak, who reportedly resigned as U.S. attorney before Trump could fire him.
Pak told committee members that former Attorney General William Barr called him directly and asked him to look into allegations of voter fraud made by Giuliani.
Pak said the FBI conducted a full investigation and didn’t find any evidence of fraud.
“The FBI interviewed individuals that are depicted in that video reportedly double, triple counting the ballots and determined that nothing irregular happened in the county,” Pak testified. “The allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.”
On Dec. 3, 2020, Giuliani and his legal team testified before a state Senate committee looking into the election.
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He tried to convince lawmakers that they had the constitutional authority to toss out people’s votes and pick their own electors who would vote for Trump.
“And the fact that you have the power to do this, state law doesn’t in any way prevent the legislature from immediately taking this over and deciding this,” Giuliani said then.
Many legal experts dispute this. That plan ultimately failed when Gov. Brian Kemp refused to call a special session of the legislature, saying he didn’t have the constitutional authority to do that.
It was at that hearing that Giuliani also introduced a security camera video that he claimed showed Fulton County elections workers sending Republican poll watchers home, then pulling a box of ballots out from under the table and counting them.
“I think today revealed the smoking gun we’ve been looking for,” Giuliani said outside the hearing room.
But Pak accused Giuliani of showing lawmakers only select clips from that security video, and after examining the entire hours-long video, federal and state investigators determined the box was a regular ballot box simply stored under the table earlier in the day.
Pak said that Fulton County elections workers mistakenly stopped the counting, so the Republican poll watchers left for the night.
Later, those workers were ordered to keep counting, so, Pak said, they pulled out that regular ballot box and continued.
The fact that it was all on security video, said investigators, showed there was no fraud.
“Unfortunately, during the Senate hearing, Mr. Giuliani only played a clip that showed them pulling out the official ballot box from under the table and referring to that as a smoking gun of fraud in Fulton County,” Pak said. “When in actuality, in review of the entire video, it shows that was actually an official ballot box that was kept underneath the tables.”
Pak testified that he found no evidence of any widespread fraud sufficient to overturn Trump’s defeat in Georgia.
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