On Monday's edition of CNN's "The Lead," reporter Katelyn Polantz broke down the significance of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) in the Trump team's plot to overturn the 2020 election — and the effort by Justice Department investigators to obtain access to his phone.
This comes after new reporting that Perry was active in pushing the White House to investigate "Italygate," a bizarre conspiracy theory that Italian satellites remotely reprogrammed voting machines to switch votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
"Has the Justice Department got access to Perry's phone?" asked anchor Jake Tapper.
"That we don't know yet, but we're able to report through our sources and also through some public court filings that have been out there, some observations of the courthouse that the Justice Department was trying to get access to the data on Scott Perry's phone and that there was an under seal court proceeding around this," said Polantz. "Jake, Scott Perry is a pretty notable person in this effort after the election for Donald Trump. He was the person introducing Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark to Trump. He was pushing for others in the federal government to get involved, to be looking into election security, to push these baseless fraud claims and also, he was interested in the intelligence community even looking into voting machines."
"Obviously, this revelation, this story you're breaking right now, it makes many of Perry's past text messages take on new significance," said Tapper.
"Right," said Polantz. "So the House Select Committee and CNN, as well, were able to get access to some of the Meadows text messages, not everything Meadows communicated around this time, but in them there are messages from Representative Scott Perry to Meadows, and what he was saying was he wanted to get a message out to anyone who would be sympathetic and pass information to a cyber forensics team and share with people in states and asking him for contacts and writes things like Meadows, he's asking him preserve the specific voting machine scanners, under lock and key and nobody touches them. Preserve all email communications with the officials responsible for the software updates, deploying software updates to the voting machines, preserve laptop, iPad, phone, any device used in the execution of duties to update voting machines. These text messages at that time, Jake, are about prying into the election administration, getting someone inside the White House close to Donald Trump to help."
Watch the video below or at this link.
Katelyn Polantz details Scott Perry's involvement in election plots www.youtube.com
