Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has been forced to spend half a million dollars defending himself in court for having stood up to former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The only way to spare himself from the defamation lawsuit he has been fighting, he and his lawyer say, would be to lie.
The lawsuit centers on a 2020 video that purported to show election fraud in Georgia. The video, which was presented to state lawmakers, showed security footage of election workers tabulating ballots in Atlanta. Multiple news media outlets and the secretary of state’s office have debunked the claims of election fraud made in the video presentation to legislators.
The plaintiff in the case, Jacki Pick, a Texas-based Republican podcast host who guided the lawmakers through the 30-minute presentation, sued Mr. Raffensperger for defamation over how he described the video in his book, “Integrity Counts.” He wrote that the video “had been deceptively sliced and edited.” Ms. Pick, who is married to the Texas multimillionaire and megadonor Doug Deason, claims she was defamed, even though Mr. Raffensperger’s book never mentioned her by name.
Ms. Pick’s lawyers let it be known that if Mr. Raffensperger wanted to settle the case, he would first have to say publicly that her presentation of the video was not deceptive. In other words, Mr. Raffensperger says, he would effectively have to tell his own new lie.
Mr. Raffensperger, who self-published his book, is paying legal expenses out of his own pocket. He has recently launched a legal-defense fund to help defray the costs.
The lawsuit against Mr. Raffensperger comes as state and local election officials across the country increasingly feel under fire. In the aftermath of the 2020 election and in the years since, election officials have been reporting death threats, infiltration attempts and voluminous requests for information from right-wing election activists, many of whom are motivated almost exclusively by falsehoods and lies that the 2020 election was stolen. A study by the Brennan Center in May found that one out of every three election officials reported experiencing threats or abuse.
Mr. Raffensperger fears that the lawsuit could be a harbinger of a new kind of harassment: wealthy activists burying election officials in costly litigation as a form of coercion.
“I have incurred over $500,000 in legal fees to fight these frivolous claims,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement. “Not every election official is going to be able to withstand that type of pressure,” he said. “This should send alarms to every election official across the country.”
Bill Whitehill, a lawyer for Ms. Pick, disputed that the lawsuit required any reflection on the 2020 election, stating, “Ms. Pick never once asked Mr. Raffensperger to make statements regarding the 2020 election; her only concern is in repairing her damaged reputation.”
But last year, different lawyers for Ms. Pick drafted a suggested statement for Mr. Raffensperger to issue, saying “the critical issue for now is the statement,” according to emails between lawyers obtained by The Times.
Part of the paragraph-long suggestion Ms. Pick’s lawyers wrote included a sentence declaring, “The video in her presentation was neither edited, nor deceptive.”
To Mr. Raffensperger, the suggestion was a nonstarter: For Georgia’s top election official to deny that the video was deceptive would amount to endorsing the video’s debunked claims.
Conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been revived of late. Recent posts on social media resuscitating disproved claims about Sharpie markers bleeding through and corrupting ballots and ballot-counting irregularities in Fulton County, Ga., were seen by millions of users. And the State Election Board of Georgia voted last week to reinvestigate claims of fraud in Fulton County in the 2020 election, accusations that have been investigated and dismissed multiple times. The Fulton County results were also upheld by at least three recounts and audits.
But they remain an obsession of conservative election activists. And of Mr. Trump.
The former president shared a video last week of the State Election Board reviewing calls to reinvestigate the 2020 election.
“We can’t let this happen again,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.
From Podcaster to Presenter
Ms. Pick arrived in late November 2020 at the law offices of Smith & Liss in Atlanta, a volunteer in the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the election results in the state. She was tasked with organizing affidavits for a soon-to-be-filed lawsuit alleging election fraud, according to court documents.
But on the night of Dec. 2, the law firm obtained what it proclaimed to be a “smoking gun” of election malfeasance: 20 hours of unedited security footage from State Farm Arena in Atlanta that Rudolph W. Giuliani and his team claimed would show that election workers had secretively tabulated ballots from unmarked suitcases in the dark of night after sending poll watchers and reporters home. (It did not.)
Between 1 and 3 a.m., Ms. Pick pored over the video, matching it to affidavits and media reports in an attempt to prove ballots were illegally tabulated. Her familiarity with the video led to a request from the team: Would she be willing to present the video the next day to members of the Georgia General Assembly?
“Apparently I point like Vanna White,” Ms. Pick said in court documents, referring to a joke in the office about her reaction to the video. She continued: “That was what I was asked to do, is show people what’s happening.”
The next day, Ms. Pick led state lawmakers through a presentation of the video, calling attention to specific moments to show what the legal team claimed were irregularities and illicit behavior by two poll workers inside State Farm Arena. “I’m just helping out the legal team here and going to explain to you the evidence that we have from the State Farm Arena here in Fulton County, which goes to what Ray was talking about in terms of fraud or misrepresentation,” Ms. Pick said at the beginning of her presentation, referring to Ray Smith, one of the attorneys working on the case.
The video spread like wildfire among activists and others who believed the presidential election had been stolen, eagerly shared as some of the first evidence to purportedly substantiate weeks of false claims and promoted as the first “smoking gun” to back up the Trump campaign claims. Mr. Trump shared it on his campaign’s social media accounts, and it rocketed to millions of views, as “State Farm Video” became shorthand on conservative media for evidence of a stolen election.
Ms. Pick also promoted the video in conservative media. Speaking with Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire in December 2020, she said, “If we cannot prove that those were legal ballots, they are in question. So it is sufficient to overturn the election.”
But the video did not show what activists claimed. As Mr. Raffensperger and members of his office explained, no one had told the observers or members of the press to leave; some workers simply believed they were finished for the night. Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating official in the secretary of state’s office, told The Associated Press at the time that the footage showed “normal ballot processing.”
Investigators in the secretary of state’s office sat down with a local news reporter to dispel the false claims about the video, showing, frame by frame, that there were no magically late arriving ballots or workers gone rogue. “These are just typical everyday election workers who are just doing their jobs,” Mr. Sterling said.
Mr. Sterling accused Mr. Trump and his allies of “intentionally misleading the public about what happened at State Farm Arena on election night,” saying, “They had the whole video too and ignored the truth.”
A Battle Over Blame
Though the State Farm video would endure in the zeitgeist of conservative election activists, Ms. Pick returned to her podcast, focusing on conservative issues and energy policy.
Yet her involvement drew the attention of state prosecutors investigating Mr. Trump and his allies’ attempts to subvert the 2020 results in Georgia. They subpoenaed Ms. Pick to testify, but a Texas judge quashed the demand.
Within a few weeks of that legal victory, Ms. Pick wrote to Mr. Raffensperger accusing him of defaming Ms. Pick in his book, which was published a year after the 2020 election. She demanded he pull all copies from shelves and issue an apology acknowledging that he had “falsely accused her of dishonesty and false statements to the legislature regarding the Nov. 3, 2020 presidential election and the Georgia recount.”
Three days later, Ms. Pick sued him in federal court in Texas.
Mr. Raffensperger responded by saying he had never heard of Ms. Pick.
But her lawsuit argued that his denigration of the State Farm video extended to her personally, and she vowed “to expend an enormous amount of time and money repairing her reputation.”
The Texas suit was dismissed last October because the court lacked jurisdiction over Mr. Raffensperger.
In April, she refiled it in federal court in Georgia.
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