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Ex-Fulton County election worker Wandrea ArShaye ‘Shaye’ Moss told the Jan. 6 committee that she has received a barrage of harassment and threats after Rudy Giuliani accused her of passing along a USB connected to fake votes that turned out to be a ginger mint.
‘It’s turned my life upside down,’ Moss said, adding that she hardly leaves the house, gained 60 lbs and oftentimes wouldn’t even introduce herself using her real name.
Schiff asked the election worker: ‘Mr. Giuliani accused you and your mother of passing some sort of USB drive to each other. What was your mom actually handing you in that video?’
‘A ginger mint,’ Moss said.
‘As a result, I have been threatened and harassed. One stranger told me: ‘Be glad [it’s] 2020 and not 1920.’ Others told me I should hang alongside my mom for committing treason. My son received some of those threats.’
Ex-Fulton County election worker Wandrea ArShaye ‘Shaye’ Moss told the Jan. 6 committee that she has received a barrage of harassment and threats after Rudy Giuliani accused her of passing along a USB connected to fake votes that turned out to be a ginger mint
‘It’s turned my life upside down,’ Moss said, adding that she hardly leaves the house, gained 60 lbs and oftentimes wouldn’t even introduce herself using her real name
Moss, along with her mother Ruby Freeman, were accused by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of ‘rigging’ the presidential election count in Georgia. The two, according to Trump and his allies, allegedly brought in ‘suitcases’ full of ballots for Biden.
The former Georgia election official and her mother are now suing Giuliani in federal court after receiving death threats when Trump publicly named them and following an investigation in the state that found no wrongdoing by the pair.
‘I no longer give out my business card, I don’t transfer calls, I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I don’t go anywhere at all. I gained about 60 pounds, I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere. I second guess everything I do,’ Moss told the committee as she choked back sobs.
‘It’s affected my life in a major way – in every way.’
Moss, along with her mother Ruby Freeman, were accused by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of ‘rigging’ the presidential election count in Georgia
Moss, in black, is pictured embracing her mother Ruby Freeman after her testimony
Jan. 6 panel chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., hugs Freeman after the hearing
Schiff asked the black former election worker if the attacks were racist in nature.
‘A lot of threats. Wishing death upon me…A lot of them were racist. A lot of them were just hateful.’
Freeman, Moss’ mother, also said in recorded testimony played at the hearing Tuesday that she doesn’t feel safe anywhere.
Following the near-three-hour hearing on Tuesday, the lawmakers got up to hug Moss and her grandmother at the witness stand.
Moss told the committee that she had gone into election administration because her grandmother impressed upon her that black people had not always had the right. She said she’d been forced to leave the job due to the threats and harassment she received.
The woman even said that a mob of protesters had broken into her grandmother’s home with the intent of performing a ‘citizen’s arrest.’
Moss and her mother’s defamation lawsuit was filed in December in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Freeman said that because of the accusations a mob surrounded her home on January 6, she received hundreds of threatening emails, texts and calls, including a Christmas card that said, ‘You deserve to go to jail, you worthless piece of s**t whore.’
Freeman and Moss worked in heavily Democratic Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, where a strong showing by Biden helped give the Democrat a narrow Georgia victory.
Trump, a Republican, and his surrogates used surveillance video of the vote count at State Farm Arena to falsely accuse Freeman and Moss of processing ‘suitcases’ full of fake ballots for Biden late at night on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020, after most poll workers and election observers left.
According to the complaint, Giuliani then ‘amplified the video by posting about it on social media,’ while ‘OAN, its hosts, and its staff’ took Giuliani’s assertions and ‘published them to millions of its viewers and readers.’
Moss scans mail-in paper ballots at the Georgia World Congress Center during the Georgia primary elections in Atlanta on Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Rudy Giuliani points to a map as he speaks to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election
State officials including Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger quickly and forcefully denied the allegations, explaining that the ‘suitcases’ were standard ballot containers and the votes were properly counted under the watch of an independent monitor and a state investigator.
Giuliani has falsely claimed that the video footage showed the two women engaging in ‘surreptitious illegal activity’ and acting suspiciously, like drug dealers ‘passing out dope.’
In early January, Trump himself singled out Freeman, by name, 18 times in a telephone call in which he pressed Georgia officials to alter the state’s results. He described Freeman as a ‘known political operative’ who ‘stuffed the ballot boxes.’
Both Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr and Georgia Sec. of State’s chief operating officer Gabe Sterling debunked the ‘suitcase’ theory during Jan. 6 committee testimony.
Barr said in a clip played at the hearing Tuesday ‘Based on our review of it, including interviews of the key witnesses, the Fulton County allegations had no merit.’
‘The ballots under the table were legitimate ballots, they weren’t in a suitcase, they had been pre-opened for eventually feeding into the machine,’ Barr added.
Sterling then said that claims from the Trump team that election workers were pulling and scanning ‘thousands of ballots’ from suitcases, proving fraud, were untrue. Trump had fixated on the ‘suitcase’ theory at the time.
Video was played which Sterling said showed that the workers were engaged in ‘normal ballot processing.’
‘What you saw…the ‘secret suitcases’ with ‘magic ballots,’ were actually ballots that had been packed into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in plain view of the monitors and the press.’
‘They knew it was untrue,’ Sterling said of Trump’s legal team.
‘The problem you have is it gets to people’s hearts,’ Sterling said. ‘Once you get to the heart, facts don’t matter as much.’
In addition to Giuliani, Moss’s and Freeman’s suit targets San Diego-based Herring Networks, which owns and operates One America News Network, as well as the channel’s chief executive Robert Herring, president Charles Herring, and reporter Chanel Rion.
Giuliani frequently appeared on OAN’s programs to promote Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.
The complaint alleges that OAN broadcast stories in which Moss and Freeman were falsely accused of conspiring to produce secret batches of illegal ballots and running them through voting machines to help then-candidate Joe Biden defeat Trump.
The defamation lawsuit is the second filed this month by Moss and Freeman, who also sued the Gateway Pundit, alleging the far-right website’s unfounded reports incited months of death threats and harassment against them.
In addition to removing the reports about Freeman and Moss from OAN’s websites and other media channels, the lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages.
The OAN and Gateway Pundit lawsuits both revolve around false allegations first raised by a volunteer Trump campaign attorney at a Dec. 3 hearing of Georgia state legislators.
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