What the Georgia Bureau of Investigation Missed in Coffee County

The Fulton County indictment charged four of the 19 original defendants with discrete crimes related to the voting systems breach in Coffee County. Two of the individuals charged, Scott Hall and Sidney Powell, recently pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to unauthorized access to voting systems. Two others, Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton, have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial with the other defendants.

Fulton County prosecutors, however, are not the only investigators interested in Coffee County. In August 2022, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI)—a state-level investigative department—began investigating allegations of computer trespass and other crimes related to unauthorized access to voting equipment in Coffee County.

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The document suggests, rather, that the GBI did not investigate the Coffee County affair fully at all. The agency relied almost entirely on the previous work of civil litigants and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. It failed to seek interviews with key witnesses, and it omitted relevant evidence that is readily available in public documents.

The GBI’s investigation is difficult to evaluate comprehensively. The entirety of the report’s supporting evidence is not available publicly. Through various sources, Lawfare obtained some, but not all, of the attachments referenced in the report.

What’s more, the GBI’s strategy or organizational priorities as they relate to the Coffee County investigation are also not public. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Attorney General Carr has said that his office will “continue to coordinate” with the GBI as he mulls potential charges. So it’s possible that the bureau completed additional investigative work that is not captured in the document.

With these caveats, however, what the report suggests about the GBI’s underlying investigation is sufficiently baffling as to warrant serious scrutiny. The quality of the GBI report matters because the Fulton County investigation focused on the Coffee County caper only insofar as it reflected the larger RICO conspiracy it alleged. The GBI report was supposed to look more broadly at crimes that may have been committed in what amounted to a theft of government property organized by insiders and outsiders alike.

In short, as a report, the document amounts to a tolerable summary of the readily available evidence. As an investigation that took more than a year to complete, it seems to reflect a badly inadequate effort.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/rXZeq?wr=true