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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 3, 2023
Contact: Marilyn Marks
Coalition for Good Governance
[email protected]
704 292 9802
COALITION FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE ISSUES STATEMENT ON THE RELEASE OF THE GEORGIA BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION’S SUMMARY OF VOTING SYSTEM BREACHES
IN COFFEE COUNTY, GEORGIA
ATLANTA- Coalition for Good Governance (“CGG”) has reviewed the recent Georgia Bureau of Investigation (“GBI”) report on the Coffee County, Georgia voting system breaches published today by Lawfare, with a summary analysis by reporter Anna Bower. The GBI began its investigation of the January 2021 Coffee County voting system breaches 18 months later in August 2022. The investigative summary published today and reviewed by CGG does not include the supporting documents referenced in the report.
Much of the evidence reviewed by the GBI was obtained from CGG and the Curling Plaintiffs in the ongoing Curling v Raffensperger voting system security litigation. The vast majority of that evidence has been public for some time on the docket of the Curling case, particularly in the supporting files for the Opposition to the Motion for Summary Judgment filed in February 2023, (Docket numbers 1589-1645).
CGG and its legal and voting system security advisors are extremely disappointed in the quality of the report, because of its lack of depth, delayed timing, accuracy and limited scope. We are dismayed to see how little independent or robust investigation the GBI conducted over the course of the year they looked into the largest voting system breach in the nation’s history. They conducted only 15 generally short, limited interviews over the course of their 13 months investigation, and issued few subpoenas to attempt to get relevant documents. They seemed to generally rely on our Curling case documents, which should have been only the starting point for the state with their far more extensive discovery tools and authority, not to mention their significant financial resources.
The scope of the investigation is far too limited and focused primarily on a small number of Georgia-based witnesses or breach participants. GBI apparently did not investigate many of the individuals with prominent alleged roles in the breaches’ planning and execution, both inside Georgia and those operating at a national level. The August 2022 slow start of the investigation of the Coffee County breaches, now a household term, in the wake of the Fulton County District Attorney’s indictment is inexcusable.
Secretary of State Raffensperger and the Georgia State Election Board did not conduct a meaningful investigation themselves and waited until August 2022 to seek the GBI’s assistance looking into these massive system breaches. In April 2022, the Secretary’s office represented to the federal court that it had opened an ‘active and ongoing investigation’ in February 2022, but later admitted to reporters that their “first step” (a forensic analysis of the server) wasn’t taken until late June 2022. However, claims surrounding the Secretary’s knowledge of the breach and its investigation are conflicting and confusing. Secretary Raffensperger claimed that he had investigators “digging deep” on this intrusion in early 2021, but his office cannot seem to produce any such investigative files. CGG’s litigation discovery process has produced no records to substantiate that any state investigation was begun until late June, 2022. No evidence of any interviews or document request exists before Secretary Raffensperger lateraled this uncomfortable “investigation” to the GBI in August 2022. It is disturbing that the Secretary’s office made no attempt to preserve the email and video security records in Coffee related to these crimes, and such files were purportedly “lost” for an extended time, and still have not been fully produced.
The GBI report states that a June 2023 search warrant recovered thousands of emails and documents on the Coffee County desktop computer that Election Supervisor Misty Hampton used, including during the planning and execution of the breaches. Coffee County officials had repeatedly represented in response to CGG subpoenas that such emails were never saved on the office computer and were permanently lost. Based upon recent public knowledge that the GBI had recovered the lost emails, CGG filed legal action against Coffee County to obtain the relevant emails.
Bruce Brown, Atlanta-based attorney for CGG in the Curling litigation said, “The state waited forever to start their investigation and then undertook little serious work beyond what we had already uncovered in the litigation. Meanwhile, the state’s voting system has been left in the wild, greatly increasing the risk of malicious attacks on future elections. The GBI and the Attorney General need to take the investigation seriously and the Secretary of State must take immediate action to secure future elections.”
The GBI ignored prominent players allegedly involved in the Coffee County breaches such as members of Rudy Giuliani’s legal team, Preston Haliburton and Katherine Friess, or Sidney Powell colleague Jim Penrose. Cyber Ninja Doug Logan and his colleague Jeffrey Lenberg who spent days unlawfully accessing voting equipment in Georgia escaped significant focus in the report. While there is evidence suggesting that Powell and Giuliani raised the prospect of voting system breaches in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, the GBI did not investigate this information. Other Coffee citizens involved in the alleged software theft were also almost ignored and were not subpoenaed for documents.
Now that the public has access to the GBI investigation, it's apparent to all that the state's efforts did not explore the role the Coffee County election software breach played in the coordinated, multi state scheme by some Trump attorneys and allies to unlawfully obtain copies of voting software. Nor did the GBI attempt to ascertain the extent the software was distributed to other unauthorized individuals, nor what they now aim to do with it. Any expectation that the voting system software breach was adequately addressed by state law enforcement is negated by the GBI's meager report, further underscoring the need for the Department of Justice to investigate voting system software thefts in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania.
We look forward to Anna Bower’s soon-to-come “granular analysis” of the GBI report. There is much to tease apart here that demonstrates that the massive breaches of Georgia’s voting system must be more vigorously investigated.
Coalition for Good Governance is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization focused on election security and voter privacy. CGG is the organizational plaintiff in the Curling v Raffensperger case concerning the security of Georgia’s touchscreen voting system, in which plaintiffs obtained a 2019 federal court order declaring the use of Diebold touchscreen machines unconstitutional. Plaintiffs seek the same type of relief enjoining the use of the current Dominion touchscreen ballot marking devices.
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