US state officials testify on Trump pressure over election results

Washington, Jun 21 (EFE).- State officials testifying before the United States’ House Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday recounted how then-president Donald Trump pressured them over the result of the 2020 presidential election in the weeks leading up to the attack on the US Capitol.

The several officials said that they received harassment and/or death threats from supporters of Trump, who publicly singled them out for refusing to alter the results of the November 2020 presidential election. Poll workers were also on the receiving end of harassment, some testified.

One of the officials was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump asked to “find” votes to overturn the result in the state, alleging without evidence that the Democrats had committed fraud.

Raffensperger said his team investigated “every single allegation” of election fraud made by Trump and concluded that no crime had taken place.

When asked by Democratic congressman Adam Schiff about Trump’s claims that there were 5,000 ballots using dead people’s names in that state, Raffensperger replied that “in their lawsuits, they allege 10,315 dead people.”

“We found two dead people when I wrote my letter to Congress that’s dated Jan. 6 and subsequent to that, we found two more. That’s one, two, three, four people. Not 4,000; just a total of four. Not 10,000, not 5,000,” he said.

“Numbers don’t lie,” Raffensperger stressed, adding that his team had investigated all allegations made by Trump and his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, including that some 66,000 underage voters voted in the 2020 election.

“We found there was zero” underage voters, the Georgia secretary of state said.

After Raffensperger’s refusal to overturn the election results, he and his wife were doxed and received death threats, he said.

His deputy Gabriel Sterling described how poll workers were threatened after the 2020 elections.

Sterling told the committee that he “lost it” when he discovered that an election contractor working for Dominion Systems, the company that makes the vote-counting machines, was receiving death threats from QAnon supporters.

QAnon is an American political conspiracy theory and far-right political movement that began in 2017.

He said that he received a call from Dominion Systems’ project manager, who told him that one of the poll workers was threatened in a video posted by QAnon supporters.

After the call, Sterling said he scrolled through Twitter and found a young man’s tweet accusing the election contractor of having committed treason.

“There was a particular tweet that, for lack of a better word, it was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back,'” said Sterling, who held a press conference in December, a month after the election, where he warned that Trump’s allegations could result in violence.

Also appearing at Tuesday’s hearing was Georgia election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who told the committee about the threats and harassment she faced after becoming a target of Trump and his supporters.

Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, also an election worker, were accused by the president, who did not provide evidence, of having manipulated vote tallies in favor of winner Joe Biden during election night.

Consequently, both women received “hateful” and “racist” threats via Facebook.

“A lot of threats, wishing death upon me. Telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like ‘be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920,'” Moss said.

A video of Freeman’s taped testimony was shown at the session, in which she said she had lost her reputation because of Trump’s baseless accusations.