ATLANTA — During the 2020 election, Fulton County utilized State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta as a place to count ballots.
Surveillance video from the counting site ended up being used to help support unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies.
The first mention of the video came during a state Senate committee hearing where Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the video showed election workers throwing Republicans out of the room and counting “suitcases” of illegal ballots in the middle of the night.
“I think that today revealed the smoking gun we’ve been looking for. The video makes it clear,” Giuliani told Channel 2′s Richard Elliot following the first day of those hearings. “They took ballots from under a table and counted them in the middle of the night. This is what they were doing all throughout the country. Luckily, there is now a tape of it.”
After the hearing, “(Trump) issued a tweet amplifying the knowingly false claims made in (the) presentation in Georgia: ‘Wow! Blockbuster testimony taking place right now in Georgia. Ballot stuffing by the Dems when Republicans were forced to leave the large counting room. Plenty more coming, but this alone leads to an easy win of the State!’” a federal indictment handed up against Trump on Aug. 1 said.
At another Georgia House hearing days later, Giuliani once again showed the video saying it showed “voter fraud right in front of people’s eyes” and was “the tip of the iceberg,” the federal indictment said.
During this hearing, Giuliani called out two Fulton County election workers by name, mother and daughter Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, accusing them of “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine,” and said their homes should have been searched for evidence of ballots and USB ports, the Aug. 1 indictment said.
Following the hearing, the video and all of the claims were quickly investigated and debunked by federal and state investigators.
The Secretary of State’s Office even walked Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray through the full video from State Farm Arena, frame-by-frame.
“No magically-appearing ballots,” Gabriel Sterling with the Secretary of State’s office said. “These were ballots that were processed in front of the monitors, processed in front of the monitors and placed there in front of the monitors.”
Even with the allegations made by Giuliani being found to be untrue, Trump repeatedly stated that there was election fraud throughout Georgia, the August indictment said.
The document said on Dec. 8, 2020, a senior campaign advisor of Trump’s “expressed frustration that many of [an unnamed co-conspirator’s] and his legal team’s claims could not be substantiated.”
That same advisor also had this to say about the State Farm Arena video in an email mentioned in the indictment: “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases.”
After the hearings, Freeman and Moss received death threats and were even forced to leave their home.
Channel 2 Action News went to Washington, DC as the women testified before the Jan. 6 Committee.
“She called me screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘Shaye, Shaye! Oh my God, Shaye!’ Just freaking me out,” Moss testified.
“I had to move out of my house because the FBI said it wasn’t safe,” Freeman testified before the committee.
Freeman said statements Giuliani made turned their lives upside down.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” she testified. “All because a group of people starting with No. 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter Shaye.”
In June, The state elections board found no evidence of fraud during the 2020 ballot counting site at the State Farm Arena.
It also cleared Freeman and Moss of any wrongdoing.
The women have sued Giuliani for defamation. They’re seeking sanctions against him, accusing him of failing to preserve some electronic evidence.
In July, Giuliani finally admitted, he lied, specifically that he doesn’t contest that his “factual statements were false.”
But he added that he believes it was constitutionally protected speech so he’s not liable for damages and that’s why his legal teams say they’re trying to move past the fact-finding phase so they can argue those points before the judge.
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