Trump allies linked to Georgia elections breach
Investigation indicates lawyer Sidney Powell was among those who helped compromise voting machines, data.
ATLANTA — The tale of breached voting equipment in one of the country’s most important political battleground states involves a bail bondsman, a prominent attorney tied to former President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and a cast of characters from a rural county that rarely draws notice from outsiders.
How they all came together and what it could mean for the security of voting in November’s midterm elections are questions tangled up in a lawsuit and state investigations that have prompted calls to ditch the machines altogether.
Details of the unauthorized access of sensitive voting equipment in Coffee County, Ga., became public last month, when documents and emails revealed the involvement of highprofile Trump supporters. That’s also when the breach caught the attention of the Atlanta-based prosecutor leading a separate investigation into Trump’s efforts to undo his loss in the state.
Since then, revelations about what happened in the county of 43,000 people have raised concerns that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia may have been compromised.
The breach was first disclosed in an Atlanta-area bail bondsman’s rambling phone call to the head of an election security advocacy group involved in a long-running lawsuit targeting Georgia’s voting machines.
According to a recording filed in court, the bail bondsman said he had chartered a jet and was with a computer forensics team at the Coffee County elections office when they “imaged every hard drive of every piece of equipment.”
That happened on Jan. 7, 2021, a day after the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and two days after a runoff election in which Democrats won both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats.
The trip to Coffee County, about 200 miles south of Atlanta, to copy data and software from voting equipment was directed by attorney Sidney Powell and other Trump allies, according to deposition testimony and
documents produced in response to subpoenas.
Later that month, security camera video shows, two men involved in efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election in several states spent days going in and out of the Coffee County elections office.
The video also shows local election and Republican Party officials welcoming the visitors and allowing them access to the election equipment — contradicting some of the officials’ denials of involvement.
The new information has made Coffee County, where Trump won nearly 70% of the vote in 2020, a focal point of concerns over voting machine security. While there is no evidence that there were widespread problems with voting equipment in 2020, some Trump supporters have spread false information about the machines and the election outcome.
Election security experts and activists fear state election officials aren’t responding quickly enough to what they see as a real threat.
The copying of the software and its availability for download means potential bad actors could build exact copies of the Dominion system to test different types of attacks, said UC Berkeley computer scientist Philip Stark, an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the voting machines lawsuit.
“This is like bank robbers having an exact replica of the vault that they’re trying to break into,” he said.
Stark said the risks could be minimized by using handmarked paper ballots and rigorous audits.
Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, the group that has sued over the voting machines, said the state has been slow to investigate. She was on the receiving end of the phone call from the bail bondsman.
The state, she said, has been “looking the other way when faced with flashing red lights of serious voting system security problems.”
Dominion says its equipment remains secure, and state officials say they’re confident the election system is safe. Coffee County election equipment that has not already been replaced will be swapped out before early voting begins next month, the secretary of state’s office said Friday.
State officials noted they had been deluged by false claims after the 2020 election.
“In retrospect, you can say, ‘Well what about this, this and this?’” said Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office. “In real time, no, there was no reason to think that.”
In security video from late January 2021, a few weeks after the computer
forensics team visited, a secretary of state’s office investigator is seen arriving at the Coffee County elections office. He and the election supervisor then walk into the room that houses the election management system server. Seconds later, Jeff Lenberg, who Michigan authorities say was part of an effort to gain access to voting machines there, is seen walking out of that room.
Asked whether Lenberg’s presence around sensitive election equipment raised concerns for the investigator, secretary of state’s office spokesperson Mike Hassinger said the investigator was looking into an unrelated matter and didn’t know who Lenberg was.
Security video also shows another man, Doug Logan, at the office in mid-January. Logan founded a company called Cyber Ninjas, which led a discredited partisan review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Ariz.
In May 2021, Coffee County’s new election supervisor raised concerns with the secretary of state’s office after finding Logan’s business card beside a computer. The supervisor’s concerns were reportedly referred to an investigator, but he testified that no one ever contacted him.
Hassinger said that the secretary of state’s office responds to allegations when
they are raised, but that “information about unauthorized access to Coffee County’s election equipment has been kept hidden” by local officials and others.
Much of what is known was uncovered through documents, security camera video and depositions in response to subpoenas in the lawsuit filed by voters and the election security advocacy group. The suit alleges Georgia’s touchscreen voting machines are not secure and seeks to force the state to use hand-marked paper ballots instead.
The recently produced evidence of a breach wasn’t the first sign of problems in Coffee County, which also caused headaches for state election officials in the hectic weeks following the 2020 election. It’s likely that turmoil helped open the door for Trump’s allies.
In early December 2020, the county elections board declined to certify the results of a machine recount requested by Trump, saying the system had produced inaccurate results. In a video posted online days later, the former county election supervisor said the election software could be manipulated; as she spoke, the password to the county election management server could be seen on a note stuck to her computer.
At the end of December, Cathy Latham, the Coffee
County GOP chair and a fake elector for Trump, claimed at a state legislative committee hearing that the voting machines were unreliable.
Within days of that hearing, Latham said, she was contacted by Scott Hall, the bail bondsman, who was a Republican observer of an election recount. She said in a deposition that Hall asked her to connect him with the Coffee County election supervisor (who later was accused of falsifying time sheets and forced to resign).
A few days later, on Jan. 7, Hall met with the computer forensics team from data solutions firm SullivanStrickler at the Coffee County elections office. The team copied the data and software on the election management system server and other voting system components, a company executive said in a deposition. The company said it believed its clients had the necessary permission to make the copies.
Invoices show the data firm billed Powell, the attorney and Trump ally, $26,000 for the day’s work.
“Everything went smoothly yesterday with the Coffee County collection,” the firm’s chief operating officer wrote to Powell in an email. “Everyone involved was extremely helpful.”