Trump’s team considered overturning Georgia Senate race using breached voting data

Two men employed by the legal team of former US president Donald Trump discussed via text message whether to use a compromised voting machine in a remote Georgia county in 2021 to decertify the state's upcoming Senate runoff results.

Two persons entered an election office in Coffee County, Georgia on January 7, 2021, the day after rioters seized the US Capitol. Coffee County is a rural area of the state that largely supported Trump in the presidential election of 2020. They transferred sensitive voting data onto a portable hard disc with the aid of a local election official.

The texts, which were sent two weeks after operatives broke into a voting machine in Coffee County, Georgia, reveal for the first time that Trump supporters thought about using voting data in an effort to maintain a Republican majority in the US Senate as well as to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

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The two men are former NSA official Jim Penrose and CEO of Cyber NinjasDoug Logan.

While Penrose was working with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to access voting machines in Georgia, Logan's firm purports to run audits of voting systems. Penrose in a text on 19 January wrote to Logan,“Here’s the plan. Let’s keep this close hold."

In the text, Penrose references to the upcoming certification of Democrat Jon Ossoff’s win over Republican David Perdue. “We only have until Saturday to decide if we are going to use this report to try to decertify the Senate run-off election or if we hold it for a bigger moment,” Penrose wrote.

The attempt to hack voting machines in Coffee County, which was coordinated by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell of Trump's legal team, is part of a larger criminal investigation into intervention in the 2020 election being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

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Sources told CNN that Willis' office is considering whether to file charges in a potential racketeering case involving several defendants. The two persons who committed the Coffee County breach and were in contact with Penrose and Logan are among the people Willis has subpoenaed.

As part of her investigation, Willis has also subpoenaed Giuliani and Powell. According to the jury foreperson, the special grand jury assembled for the case recommended issuing several indictments in its final report, which was finished in February.

Penrose and Powell also agreed to pay a cyber forensics company before it deployed a team to Coffee County on 7 January, 2021, according to emails acquired by CNN.

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The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is also looking into the Coffee County breach.

As part of his federal investigation into attempts to rig the 2020 election and the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, Special Counsel Jack Smith also appears to be looking into the larger effort to hack or seize polling equipment. It is unknown if he is in possession of any evidence pertaining to the Coffee County breach.

According to access records examined by CNN and evidence made public on January 6 by the committee, the breached data was subsequently uploaded to an encrypted server and shared with a number of Trump supporters.

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