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Biden transition: Trump's grievances feed menacing undertow after US election

9 minutes to read
'It has all gone too far': Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling calls out US President Trump for not condemning threats against election workers. Video / GPB

'It has all gone too far': Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling calls out US President Trump for not condemning threats against election workers. Video / GPB

AP
By Colleen Long, Calvin Woodward

The last throes of Donald Trump's presidency have turned ugly — even dangerous.

Death threats are on the rise. Local and state election officials are being hounded into hiding. A Trump campaign lawyer is declaring publicly that a federal official who defended the integrity of the United States election should be "drawn and quartered" or simply shot.

Neutral public servants, Democrats and growing number of Republicans who won't do what Trump wants are being caught in a menacing postelection undertow stirred by Trump's grievances about the election he lost.

"Death threats, physical threats, intimidation — it's too much, it's not right," said Gabriel Sterling, a Republican elections official in Georgia who implored Trump to "stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence."

Trump in response only pressed his groundless case that he lost unfairly, neither discouraging trouble nor explicitly calling for it.

The triggering of emotions has always been a Trump staple. His political movement was born in arenas that echoed with supporters' chants of "lock her up."

Support was animated over the past four years by his relentlessly mocking ways, his slams against the "enemy of the people," and his raw talent for belittling political foes with insulting nicknames like "Sleepy Joe" Biden. That's one of the nicer ones.

But in the last weeks of Trump's presidency, the tenor has taken on an even more toxic edge as state after state has affirmed Biden's victory, judge after judge has dismissed his campaign's legal challenges and Trump's cadre of loyalists has played to his frustrations.

As Biden builds the foundation of his new administration, Trump is commanding attention for the agitations he is likely to carry forward when he is gone from office.

"I do not think this goes away on January 20," Eric Coomer, security director for Dominion Voting Systems, said from the secret location where is hiding out from death threats. "I think it will continue for a long time."

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Tough beans, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said of the state officials who are fearing for their safety.

"They're the one who should have the courage to step up," Giuliani said in Michigan. "You have got to get them to remember that their oath to the Constitution sometimes requires being criticised. Sometimes it even requires being threatened."

For Coomer, the trouble began around the time Trump campaign lawyers falsely claimed that his company had rigged the election.

Far-right chat rooms posted his photo, details about his family and address. "The first death threats followed almost immediately," he told AP. "For the first couple days it was your standard online Twitter threats, 'hang him, he's a traitor.'"

But then came targeted phone calls, text messages and a handwritten letter to his father, an army veteran, from a presumed militia group saying: "How does it feel to have a traitor for a son?"

Even now, weeks later and relocated to a secret location, Coomer is getting messages from people saying they know what town he has fled to and vowing to find him.

"It's terrifying," he said. "I've worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people end up getting killed over it. And I feel that we're on the verge of that."

This week Joe diGenova, a Trump campaign lawyer, told a radio show that the federal election official who was fired for disputing Trump's claims of fraud "should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot."

This, as election officials and voting-system contractors in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere have been subjected to sinister threats for doing their jobs.

"Threats like these trigger an avalanche of them," said Louis Clark, executive director and CEO of the Government Accountability Project, an organisation to protect whistleblowers. Of diGenova, Clark said: "It's behaviour befitting a mob attorney."

DiGenova later said he was joking. The fired official, Christopher Krebs, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post: "My lawyers will do the talking, they'll do it in court. ... They're going to be busy."

As "Anonymous," former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor wrote a searing insider account of the Trump Administration, prompting Trump to tell his rallies that "very bad things" would happen to this "traitor."

Now Taylor's identity is known and he's been assigned a security detail as the Secret Service recommended because of the nature of the threats against him.

"This is unprecedented in America," Taylor said. "This is not who we are. This is not what an open society is supposed to look like."

Taylor said intimidation has proved an effective tool to quash dissent. "I spoke to very senior former officials who wanted to come out to tell the truth during the presidential campaign, and many were afraid that it would put their families in harm's way."

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

But such pressure has not silenced some Republicans in Georgia, with telling results.

Intruders have been found on the property of GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has defended the integrity of his state's election, which resulted in a narrow Biden victory.

And a young Dominion systems contractor has been harassed with death threats and a video showing him working with election data. Dominion is the sole voting system provider in Georgia, so the company has been a lightning rod.

"There's a noose out there with his name on it," Sterling said of the contractor, in a broadside against the rhetoric and threats in the election's aftermath.

Election security expert Matt Blaze tweeted angrily about the threats.

"This is just sickening," he said. "Every conversation I have with election folks, we start with death threats we've gotten. There's no excuse for this no matter who the target is, but going after the on-the-ground technicians and other staff is a new low. Have you no shame?"

Said Sterling: "Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right."

Trump last week called Raffensperger an "enemy of the people," Sterling noted, adding, "That helped open the floodgates to this kind of crap."

In addition to seeing people drive by and come on to his property, Raffensperger's wife has been getting obscene threats on her cellphone, Sterling said.

Both men have police stationed outside their homes, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said it's investigating threats against officials to determine their credibility.

In Arizona, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said that she's faced threats of violence directed at her family and her office, which she blamed on disinformation.

Hobbs, Republican Governor Doug Ducey and other officials certified Arizona's election results on Tuesday, showing a narrow victory for Biden. Since then, Trump, the state Republican leader and a legion of online supporters have heaped criticism on Ducey for certifying results that the president baselessly disputes.

Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said the White House condemns any violence. "What I will say though, too, is that the president's lawyers (had) their private information put out," she said, blaming "leftist organisations."

"So we're seeing that happen to people on both sides of the argument and there's no place for that ever anywhere," she said. Indeed, GOP poll watchers said in their affidavits in election litigation that they felt threatened and were jeered by Democrats.

A key difference, though, is that intimidation against Republican poll workers or officials by Trump's opponents did not come from the top. Biden has largely stayed out of the fray even as Trump systematically maligns the process, the election workers, the state officials who resist his pressure and some of the judges.

He's gone repeatedly after Dominion Voting Systems, falsely branding it a "radical left company" responsible for a "stolen" election — in contrast to the assurances of state and federal officials that the election was run fairly and remarkably smoothly in the midst of a pandemic, with none of the massive fraud alleged by the president.

Attorney-General William Barr affirmed the legitimacy of the process yesterday when he told AP the Justice Department found nothing untoward in the election that could change the outcome — Trump's defeat. That began a drumbeat of discontent by Trump loyalists over Barr, himself a longtime Trump loyalist.

For Coomer, Dominion's director of product strategy and security, "this election was incredibly smooth across the board."

But he started hearing himself named in empty conspiracy theories shortly after AP and other news organisations called the race for Biden.

Sometime around Eric Trump's post-election tweets about Coomer and a bizarre news conference where Trump lawyers Giuliani and Sidney Powell spun fabrications about Dominion and called him out by name, the real trouble started. ′

Dominion hired third-party security for him, and he was told not to go back to his house because there were credible threats to his safety.

A few nights ago, he said, he was told in a series of texts that people were watching him, that they'd rented a house in the same town where he is hiding, and that they would find him.

"It's a daily thing," he said, "and no, I have not had a decent night's sleep since all of this."

- AP