LupusDei
curious alien
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Two election workers break silence after enduring Trump backers' threats
Death threats from angry Trump supporters forced Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, a 62-year-old grandmother, to flee her home of 20 years. Some messages called for her hanging; one urged people to “hunt” her. Freeman showed hundreds of menacing messages to police and called 911 three times.
Offering the first detailed account of their ordeal, the two women told Reuters about threats of lynching and racial slurs, along with alarming visits by strangers to the homes of Freeman and her mother. The intimidation began last December, a month after the 2020 election, when the Trump campaign released surveillance video they falsely claimed showed the two women, who are Black, opening “suitcases” full of phony ballots to rig the vote count in predominantly Black Fulton County, which includes part of Atlanta.
With no one arrested for threatening them, and no police security detail, the women said their lives were thrown into chaos. Freeman told Reuters she moved from house to house out of fear for her safety. Moss, 37, avoided leaving her home except for work and said she remains wracked with anxiety and depression. Moss’s teenage son - also targeted by threats and racist messages - started failing in school.
Freeman showed hundreds of threatening emails and text messages to police in Cobb County, where she lives, according to police reports reviewed by Reuters. She visited the Fulton County police station on Dec. 4, 2020, and told officers about the threats. While she was there, her phone buzzed nonstop with menacing calls, and an unidentified officer answered more than 20 of them, according to Freeman. In response to Freeman’s at-times panicked emergency calls to 911, Cobb County officers went to her home, according to a Reuters review of the call recordings. But police officials did not open investigations into the threats she faced, according to police records.
Among the uninvited visitors to Freeman’s home was a prominent Black supporter of Trump, Trevian Kutti, who said she came to offer help. A publicist for hip-hop artist and Trump supporter Kanye West, Kutti warned Freeman that she’d be arrested soon on voting fraud charges and sought to pressure her into confessing in exchange for help, Freeman said.
Law enforcement has been more aggressive in pursuing people who threatened high-profile politicians. Police have arrested at least 12 people, almost all of them Trump supporters, who have threatened members of the U.S. Congress since the 2020 election. Last month, a New York man was arrested just days after allegedly making a death threat against Congressman Andrew Garbarino, a New York Republican who voted for an infrastructure bill that has been a priority of Democratic President Joe Biden.
Threats against election workers should be taken just as seriously, said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, who told Reuters she is pressuring the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) to act. “This is an escalating problem,” said Klobuchar. “Law enforcement has to start looking at these cases for what they are, which is a very threat to our democracy.”