Here, the authors offer some truly outrageous revelations.
When we set out to report Find Me the Votes, we had a hunch we’d be digging into the most interesting of all of the criminal investigations into Donald Trump. The GA election fraud controversy was the epicenter of Trump’s most furious efforts to overturn the 2020 election; it was where the widest scope of alleged criminality took place — from the fake elector scheme to making false statements to an alleged cyber-heist of election equipment sensitive voter data in a rural county.
There was also a troubling racial component to much of the political skullduggery being perpetrated by Trump and his confederates. There was a toxic brew in Georgia of hate-filled conspiracy theories and vicious online attacks that seemed to revive the ghosts of the state’s Jim Crow past. It led to the horrific targeting of Black election workers like Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, victims of sickening racial attacks and frighteningly specific death threats.
But it’s also a story of unsung heroes who stood in the breach to protect democracy, from Georgia’s Republican governor and attorney general who withstood furious pressure from Trump, to a 30-year-old political consultant in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office who, on her own, made the courageous decision to secretly tape Trump’s now-infamous call to her boss, Brad Raffensperger. It was, in short, crazier and more sinister than anything we imagined. Oh, and one other thing: We thought Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was going to be a pretty interesting character. We were certainly right about that.
Here are five of the most interesting and disturbing things we learned over the course of reporting Find Me the Votes:
1) Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were influenced to a far greater degree than has been publicly known by the QAnon conspiracy cult. One of the president’s most fervent supporters, celebrated lawyer L. Lin Wood, who had been brought in by Donald Trump Jr. to be the public face of the president’s legal effort in Georgia, was a full-fledged QAnon devotee who echoed the cult’s claims about a vast conspiracy of high level pedophiles that was operating to sabotage Trump’s presidency.
Woods hosted “stop the steal” strategy meetings at his Tomotley, SC, plantation where the participants — in addition to Powell and former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn — included Ron Watkins, a secretive figure who was the administrator for the main QAnon platform and was key to its bizarre messages about a supposed Deep State cabal. Trump, in turn, spurred the Tomotley crowd on. “Go knock ‘em dead,” Trump said to Wood in a taped phone call with the famed defense lawyer and Powell. We obtained a copy of the recording, in which Trump, Wood, and Powell plotted ways to encourage then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to join their crusade to overturn the election.
2) Throughout the investigation, Fani Willis was subjected to a barrage of vicious personal attacks and threats to her life and her family, including from a digitally disguised computer voice sent to her personal cell phone mentioning the names and locations of her two daughters. It was a terrifying sign of the times: a local prosecutor and her family facing threats of violence for doing her job. On the eve of her indictment, her staff grew alarmed over talk of an assassination attempt on a MAGA website. “The best time to shoot her is when she’s leaving the building,” it read.
The fear of a possible assassination attempt in turn led to a dramatic decoy operation involving a body double, in the early morning hours after Willis announced her indictment of Trump. After her press conference unveiling the charges, Willis slipped out of her black business suit while a member of her staff designated as her body double — wearing the similar-looking business suit and a wig to match Willis’ hair — emerged from the underground garage and were driven off in a convoy of SUVs. At the same time, Willis, wearing a T-shirt and sweats, was smuggled out a back entrance to a nearby hotel.
3) The bombshell tape of Trump telling Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to win in Georgia was secretly recorded by the Georgia Secretary of State’s chief aide, Jordan Fuchs, an action that was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle. It resulted in the most damning piece of evidence regarding Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials, leading directly to Fani Willis’ decision to open up the investigation into the then-president; it was also later used by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith in bringing his separate federal case against Trump. But the circumstances behind the taping is reported in Find Me the Votes for the first time.
A savvy 30-year-old political consultant, Fuchs had initially agreed to arrange the phone call at the request of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. But then Fuchs taped it — while listening in during a visit to her grandparents in Florida — without telling Raffensperger or Meadows. Fuchs has never publicly spoken about her role in taping the call, and the January 6 committee agreed not to call her as a witness at the request of a lawyer for Raffensperger’s office — in part to protect her given that Florida is a two-party consent state for the taping of phone calls. But when called to testify before Willis’ special grand jury, Fuchs was granted immunity by the District Attorney’s office and confirmed that she taped the call, according to three sources directly knowledgeable about her testimony.
However, as we write in the book, Fuchs would have a powerful defense were any Florida prosecutor attempt to charge her with illegal taping of the president: There’s an exemption from the state’s two-party consent law for law enforcement and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office is a law enforcement agency.
4) One of Donald Trump’s top legal advisors during the 2020 election battle plotted criminal break-ins at election offices around the country in order to seize voting machines and sensitive software — in an effort to prove that hidden computer algorithms had flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
In order to give semi-legal cover to the scheme, Texas lawyer Sidney Powell drew up a list of what she described as “hunting licenses.” These were, she explained at a crucial planning session in a northern Virginia hotel room, preemptive presidential pardons that could be given by then President Trump to operatives assigned to conduct the break-ins. Powell’s plotting and conspiracy-minded claims of secret vote tampering fed Trump’s own obsession with seizing voting machines (“Why don’t you guys seize machines?” he demanded of two top Justice Department officials) and ultimately led to the January 7, 2021 raid on the election offices by Trump operatives in rural Coffee County, Georgia.
The Coffee raid was a modern-day version of Watergate and an astonishingly brazen breach of voting security. It was later charged as a case of computer theft in the sprawling racketeering case brought against Trump and 18 co-defendants by Fani Willis. Powell — along with four others — has pled guilty in the case.
5) After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to block his grand jury subpoena — and losing — South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham turned on a dime “and threw Trump under the bus,” according to a source familiar with his testimony.
According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton County confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump “that Martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you.” He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.
After Graham finished testifying, he bumped into Fani Willis in a hallway and thanked her for the opportunity to tell his story. “That was so cathartic,” he told Willis. “I feel so much better.” Then, to the astonishment of one source who witnessed the scene, South Carolina’s senior senator hugged the Fulton County DA who was aggressively pursuing Trump. Willis’s reaction: “She was like ‘Whatever, dude,’” according to one witness of the strange encounter.
Klaidman and Isikoff’s book Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is available now.
