The Trumpy cultists couldn’t break them, pass me a Ginger Mint.
“The Two Heroes of the Georgia Indictment”
“Trump and his mobsters tried to bully election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss. They stood their ground.
For five years starting in 2017, Shaye Moss worked as a registration officer at the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections. Her duties were to process absentee ballot requests and voter applications, but on Election Day 2020 she was also asked to help process the vote count at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, a polling place. Moss asked her mother, a retired Fulton County worker who’d helped coordinate 911 calls, to help out.
The trouble started when Moss and Freeman got captured on video tabulating ballots after hours. The ballots had been packed up for the night, but election officials changed their mind and ordered poll workers to continue scanning them. The video showed Moss, Freeman, and others removing ballots from what a right-wing super PAC called Restoration of America alleged on Facebook were suspicious-looking “suitcases.” Funded by the billionaire Schlitz heir Richard Uihlein, Restoration of America made similar unfounded post-election allegations about other polling places around the country. In fact, the “suitcases” were merely the bags in which the ballots had been stored overnight and sealed before election officials changed their plan.
But the footage went viral; various Trump lawyers, including Giuliani, talked it up at Georgia Senate hearings, Giuliani saying Freeman and Moss were “quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”; Giuliani flagged it on Twitter (he’s since conceded, in a defamation suit brought by Moss and Freeman, that his allegations were “actionable” and “false", Sean Hannity picked it up; and on January 2—weeks after the rumor had been disproven in multiple news outlets and investigated and found false by Trump’s own Justice department—Trump babbled to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about “what looked to be suitcases or trunks” that were “stuffed with votes” and contained, “the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden.” Trump mentioned Freeman by name 18 times, calling her “a professional vote scammer.”
“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Freeman told the January 6 committee. “The president of the United States made up lies about two ordinary Americans for his own personal gain.” Freeman received death threats and for a time went into hiding. Moss was afraid to leave the house, and her teenage son, after receiving racist threats by phone, stumbled at school.
