“There Is Nowhere I Feel Safe” – Mother Jones

Wandrea “Shaye” Moss testifies earlier than the January 6 committee. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

The January 6 committee heard stay testimony at present from Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a Georgia election employee who turned the goal of a vicious harassment marketing campaign fanned by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and right-wing media retailers within the aftermath of the 2020 presidential marketing campaign. 

“It’s turned my life the other way up,” Moss mentioned. “I not give out my enterprise card. I don’t switch calls. I don’t need anybody realizing my identify…I don’t go to the grocery retailer in any respect. I haven’t been wherever in any respect. I’ve gained about 60 kilos…I second-guess all the things that I do. It’s affected my life in a significant means, in each means. All due to lies, for me doing my job, the identical factor I’ve been doing without end.”

In December 2020, Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani started to raise a misleadingly cropped video of Moss and her mom, Ruby Freeman, claiming that they have been pulling “suitcases” of “unlawful” ballots from below a desk at a Georgia vote-counting heart. Giuliani referenced the video in press conferences and on social media, tweeting that it proved “past doubt” that Fulton County Democrats had stolen the election.

At one level, Giuliani claimed that Freeman, Moss, and one other election employee had been “surreptitiously passing round USB ports” like “vials of heroin or cocaine.” In accordance with Moss, she and her mom have been actually exchanging a ginger mint. 

Even after subsequent investigations revealed that the “suitcases” have been really simply commonplace poll containers, each ladies—who’re Black—have been subjected to dying threats, racist taunts, and doxxing. In accordance with Moss, folks tried to drive their means into her grandmother’s home to make a “citizen’s arrest.” Across the week of January 6, 2021, Freeman fled her dwelling of 21 years after the FBI warned her that she was in peril.

I described that harassment in an article final yr, citing reporting by Reuters and a grievance Freeman and Moss’s attorneys filed as a part of a lawsuit towards the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing weblog:

In accordance with a Reuters investigation that detailed the harassment, Freeman’s dwelling deal with was posted on social media platforms, and Trump supporters publicly referred to as for her execution. Strangers camped exterior Freeman’s dwelling and ordered pizza for supply to lure her exterior. Images of Moss’ automotive and license plate have been posted on-line… One significantly graphic remark beneath a Gateway Pundit article referred to as for the 2 Black ladies to be “strung up from the closest lamppost and set on hearth.”

The committee additionally performed video testimony from Freeman, who described the horrific penalties of being focused by probably the most highly effective elected official within the nation. 

“There may be nowhere I really feel protected. Nowhere,” Freeman acknowledged. “Have you learnt the way it feels to have the president of the US goal you? The president of the US is meant to symbolize each American, not goal one. However he focused me—woman Ruby, a small enterprise proprietor…who stood as much as assist Fulton County run an election in the course of the center of a pandemic.”