Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade thinks that the Justice Department is looking into whether there was a coordinated conspiracy to access electronic voting machines after the 2020 election.
Video footage was released Tuesday showing that operatives of Donald Trump were able to enter a secure Georgia location thanks to a fake elector and GOP chairwoman. The operatives have said that they gained access to at least one electronic voting machine and did so because Trump lawyer Sidney Powell asked them to do it.
"This video shows a very strong kind of coordinated effort to overturn the election," NBC's Blayne Alexander reported.
McQuade explained that tampering with election machines, ballots or with voting in general is prohibited under the laws of many states.
"The reason for it is to protect the integrity of the voting systems," she said. "The chain of custody is important. Those items never fall out of a chain of certain officials who are entitled to possess them. If you give them to some third party, it compromises their integrity and leaves them vulnerable to accusations of fraud. There's also the possibility of hacking them, of reverse engineering the way the systems work for future hacking. There are a lot of reasons this increases vulnerability to our election."
Host Katy Tur asked if the video was showing a coordinated plot, and McQuade said it's possible the DOJ is looking into it as one.
"I think that is something that the Justice Department is investigating," she explained. "We know that Michael Flynn proposed using the military to seize voting machines. When that failed, they tried to do it in a one-off manner. We know some of this information in Arizona, at least to this group called the CyberNinjas, even that alone was problematic. If you could find this was coordinated at a high level, that someone like Sidney Powell or someone else close to Trump was coordinating all of this activity, that most certainly could be part of a larger investigation into conspiracy to defraud the United States. That is suggesting that the election was stolen when in fact it was not."
Powell has already been sanctioned by a judge in Michigan for bringing frivolous lawsuits and is facing a number of questions about her integrity in states after the November election.
See the full conversation below or at this link.
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