Litigation that touches on the incident and investigations into what happened are continuing after a team of pro-Trump operatives gathered at an elections office for Coffee County, Georgia, early last year after the 2020 elections and sought to copy a dramatically large collection of critical data from the county’s elections system.
The push was connected to efforts to find evidence of the imaginary fraud Trump still claims cost him the election, but unauthorized access to elections equipment and data can lead to precarious security breaches, potentially allowing those who would perpetrate misconduct to access critical infrastructure. Cathy Latham, a now former official with the Georgia Republican Party, said in a deposition taken under oath in a civil lawsuit related to election security in Georgia that she wasn’t part of what happened at the Coffee County elections office on January 7 of last year, when the breach unfolded. In other words, she didn’t participate in the attempted copying, according to her sworn descriptions.
Latham — who was also one of the fake electors who assembled for Trump in Georgia after the 2020 election — said she was at the office that day for not long at all, describing where she went in the premises and with whom she spoke in substantial detail. Now, there’s surveillance footage.
Surprise: the footage largely undercuts Latham’s entire story, indicating — just as a starting point — that she was actually at the elections office that day for a total of over four hours, where she hung around the examination of elections equipment and spoke with people involved. She led Scott Hall, a businessman participating in the effort, to where he could meet local officials and tech experts. “There were people in there, and I get uncomfortable when there’s others,” Latham claimed. In reality, surveillance footage shows she even snapped a selfie with one of the tech operatives in the building that evening, and she also greeted the expert team when members arrived, seemingly introducing them to officials. Latham also helped connect Hall with other local individuals before the group showed up on January 7 of last year carrying the support of outside interests including Trump-allied attorney Sidney Powell.
Latham was a member of the executive committee for the state GOP and the chairperson of Coffee County’s Republican Party. (She is no longer either.) Even the timing of when Latham said she arrived to the elections office on January 7 is way off. Although she indicated she got there following 4 p.m. after working a full day as a teacher, she actually arrived a little after 11:30 a.m. Big difference! She didn’t just claim something to the effect of her not remembering. She told an entire story, complete with details and multiple stages, that doesn’t reflect reality. She even specifically claimed she left the office before Hall’s exit, but she shook his hand as he left that day and herself stuck around for more than an hour. Eric Chaney, a member of the county elections board, has also lied, claiming he was unaware of illegal access to a key server and that he didn’t even accurately recognize the folks at the office when stopping by January 7. Footage shows he was there, personally witnessing what transpired, for much of the day as well.
Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons
