September 7, 2022
Technology consultants who sought evidence that Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat was fraudulent made multiple visits to a county elections office in rural Georgia in the weeks after an alleged post-election breach of voting equipment there that is the subject of a criminal investigation, reports The Washington Post.
Latham has said in sworn testimony that she taught a full day of school that day and visited the elections office briefly after classes ended. She was one of 16 Republicans who signed certificates declaring Trump the rightful winner of the 2020 election as part of the “fake elector” scheme now under investigation by federal and state prosecutors.
Experts have expressed concern that such efforts could expose details of voting systems’ hardware and software that are intended to be tightly controlled—potentially aiding hackers who might seek to alter the results of a future election.
Data copied from elections systems in other states have been published online. Georgia state officials and voting-machine makers have downplayed the risk, pointing to safeguards that they say protect the systems from tampering.
The Post reported last month that a data forensics firm hired by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell copied software and data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines used by Coffee County. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said it is investigating the matter.
Details of the Coffee County incident have come to light, largely because of a flurry of subpoenas and depositions by plaintiffs in a long-running federal lawsuit against Georgia authorities over the security of the state’s elections. Emails and other records they obtained from the data forensics firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, showed that the Coffee episode was part of a coordinated multistate effort to access voting equipment in a hunt for evidence that the election was rigged.
The plaintiffs, including several Georgia voters and the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, obtained the new surveillance video in response to a subpoena to county authorities and provided it to the Post.
The security footage shows only the exterior of the office’s entrance area, and it is not clear what the consultants Logan and Lenberg did inside.
The new surveillance footage shows three SullivanStrickler employees arriving at the Coffee elections office at 11:42 a.m. on January 7. Latham had arrived five minutes earlier, the footage shows. She greeted the SullivanStrickler team and led them inside. Shortly before 1 p.m., a fourth employee from the firm arrived.
In her deposition last month, taken by plaintiffs in the long-running civil case, Latham said she recalled having gone to the Coffee County elections office for “just a few minutes” that day—arriving sometime after 3:48 p.m. when she received a text from Misty Hampton, then the county elections supervisor, that said: “Going great so far.”
Asked during the deposition whether it would have been possible for her to go to the election office during work hours, Latham answered: “I mean, I taught a full schedule, I didn’t have a planning period, so I can’t remember.”
Records filed in the civil case last week also show that an attorney for SullivanStrickler described Latham as the “primary point of contact in coordinating and facilitating” the firm’s work in Coffee County.
The footage shows Latham entering the building before noon, then leaving at 1:26 p.m. She returned several minutes after Hampton’s 3:48 p.m. text and then finally departed after 6 p.m., it shows. The building has a side door that is not shown in the footage.
“While Mrs. Latham does not pretend to remember the details of all that occurred on that specific date more than a year and a half ago, she does remember going to the Elections Office after teaching school on January 7, 2021, to check in on some voter review panels from the runoff election, and she truthfully testified to those facts,” Cheeley, her lawyer, told The Post.
The SullivanStrickler team left the building at 7:43 p.m., more than 2½ hours after the office’s regular closing time, the footage shows. Hampton immediately followed.
The data obtained from Coffee County by SullivanStrickler included copies of virtually every component of the county voting system, including the central tabulation server, according to an inventory obtained by the plaintiffs through discovery. The firm billed Powell $26,000 for the day’s work, an invoice shows.
Hampton previously told The Post that she allowed a team of outsiders into her office after the 2020 vote so they could prove “that this election was not done true and correct.”
Hampton and attorneys for Coffee County did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The new surveillance footage shows that on January 18—eleven days after SullivanStrickler completed its work in Coffee County, Logan and Lenberg arrived at the elections office with Hampton at 4:20 p.m.
Logan, 42, was chief executive of the security firm Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by Republican state lawmakers in Arizona to hunt for fraud in the 2020 vote there. The firm’s review found Trump had lost to Joe Biden in Arizona by an even greater margin than the certified result. Logan, of Sarasota, Florida, announced earlier this year that he had shuttered the company.
Lenberg, 66, lives in Tijeras, New Mexico and previously worked in technical roles at a private laboratory operated for the National Nuclear Security Administration. A résumé for Lenberg filed in the Antrim court case stated that he has held high-level security clearances and that his past work included “developing ways to break in (if possible) to what were considered to be secure systems.”
When the pair arrived at the Coffee County elections office, both were carrying backpacks, and Lenberg brought snacks and energy drinks. Hampton and the two consultants were recorded leaving the building nearly four hours later. Logan and Lenberg returned to the elections office shortly before 9 a.m. the next morning, the footage shows, and exited after 6 p.m.
Six days later, on January 25, Lenberg was again recorded arriving at the elections office. He left nearly three hours later, then returned for shorter visits on each of the following four days, the video shows. On one occasion, he was carrying the box for a ring light system typically used to illuminate the subjects of video recordings.
The Post has reported that, according to computer logs obtained by the plaintiffs, an account in Logan’s name had accessed Coffee County data on SullivanStrickler’s file-sharing system.
In spring 2021, after Hampton resigned, Logan’s business card was found on her desk by her successor, James Barnes. Barnes sent a copy of the card to the secretary of state’s office, expressing alarm in light of the fact that the Justice Department had raised concerns about the ballot review led by Cyber Ninjas in Arizona, according to an email obtained by The Post.
An investigator in the secretary of state’s office was directed to follow up with county officials and “verify what if any contact cyber ninjas had with any election equipment,” emails show. Barnes said in a sworn deposition that state officials never contacted him.
A spokesman for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) did not directly address questions from the Post about the agency’s response to Barnes’s concern or say whether the agency sought the security-camera footage at the time.
Raffensperger has said publicly that, after the election, his staff devoted time to pursuing every tip of alleged voter fraud. Raffensperger’s office has told the court that it began investigating the Coffee County matter in February of this year—when allegations of the breach first became an issue in the long-running lawsuit.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said it has been working with Raffensperger’s office and opened the criminal case on August 15.
Research contact: @washingtonpost
