Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/306

 Arena that showed election workers scanning ballots, sometimes after partisan poll watchers had gone home. Although the poll watchers should have been there the entire time while election workers counted the votes, there was nothing nefarious about the circumstances and no question about the end result. In fact, the FBI, Department of Justice, and Georgia Bureau of Investigation would determine that these ballots were legitimate ballots, that observers were not illegally ejected, and that the ballots were scanned and counted properly, contrary to claims by President Trump and his attorneys. And yet Giuliani baselessly declared at the December 3rd hearing that, to him, the video was a "powerful smoking gun" proving that "those votes are not legitimate votes."

But Giuliani's claims took a more ominous turn during the December 10th hearing. There, he publicly named two of the election workers shown in the video, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea ArShaye "Shaye" Moss, and accused them of vote-tampering and engaging in criminal conduct. He seized on a clip of Freeman passing Moss a ginger mint, claiming that the two women, both Black, were smuggling USB drives "as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine." He also suggested that Freeman and Moss should be jailed and that they deserved to have their homes searched. Not only were Giuliani's claims about Freeman and Moss reckless, racist, and false, they had real-world consequences that turned both women's lives upside down. And further heightening the personal impact of these baseless attacks, President Trump supported, and even repeated, them, as described later.

In the end, the hearings were widely panned. In Michigan alone, current and former Republican lawmakers publicly questioned the hearings and implored President Trump and his team to stop. U.S. Representative Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.) implored on Twitter "Please JUST STOP!" and "wondered why Republican leaders allowed testimony he said was 'driving the party into this ditch.'" Similarly, former Michigan lawmaker Martin Howrylak (R-Oakland) said that he was "embarrassed" by the hearing, and former Michigan Senator Ken Sikkema (R-Grand Rapids) said that "the way the committee was run was atrocious." Later, the President promoted a tweet calling a Democratic lawmaker a "#pos" for speaking out at the Michigan hearing. Months later, Giuliani's license to practice law in New York was suspended for, among other reasons, the "false claims" he made on various dates, including during the hearings in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.