Trump lawyers shared sensitive election files with conspiracy theorists - report

Sensitive election system files were shared with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators

Lawyers working for Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential defeat reportedly shared sensitive election system files with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, according to a news report.

The sensitive files were saved on a server by a Georgia computer forensics firm, from where they were downloaded dozens of times, company records show, according to The Washington Post.

Records show that the downloaders included accounts linked with a Texas meteorologist who featured on Sean Hannity’s radio show, a conservative podcaster who called for the execution of political enemies, an ex-pro surfer who propagated untrue and disproven theories claiming that the 2020 presidential polls were manipulated and a self-claimed former “seduction and pickup coach” who claims to be a hacker.

In the records obtained by the plaintiffs from Atlanta-based legal technology based firm SullivanStrickler, contracts have been found between the firm and the attorneys linked with Mr Trump, including Sidney Powell. The records were procured in a long-running federal lawsuit concerning Georgia’s voting systems.

The crucial data files have been termed as copies of components from election systems in Coffee County, Ga and Antrim County, Michigan.

The US tightly regulates access to the country’s voting system software, and other components are strictly monitored with the administration classifying these systems as “critical infrastructure”.

However, it is the first time distribution of the files from the election systems among people in multiple states in the new set of records has been reported.

The Post had previously reported that emails and other records confirmed that the attorneys working for Mr Trump asked SullivanStrickler to access the election systems in at least three crucial states, leading to copying of the election system.

American attorney Powell sent a team to Michigan to copy election data from a rural county and also for the same to be done in the Detroit area, as per the documents. An attorney from Mr Trump’s campaign sent the team to Nevada.

Data was also reportedly copied by SullivanStrickler from a Dominion voting system in Coffee County, Georgia on 7 January in 2021.

David D Cross, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said that the electoral breach “is way beyond what we thought”.

“The scope of it is mind-blowing,” he said.

SullivanStrickler has said that the attorneys who got the firm on board for the task asked them to “contact county officials to obtain access to certain data” from Dominion Voting Systems machines in Georgia and Michigan.

“Likewise, the firm was directed by attorneys to distribute that data to certain individuals,” it said in a statement.

The legal technology firm has stated that they “had [and has] no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct SullivanStrickler to do anything either improper or illegal”, adding that they will be “fully cooperative” with investigators.