Liz Harrington, a communications aide described as a true believer in the former president’s lies about a stolen election, helped prepare the report. Mr. Trump said he would release it on Monday.
Hours after former President Donald J. Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges accusing him of a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, his aides and allies awoke to a social-media post from the Republican front-runner inviting people to a news conference on Monday.
“A Large, Complex, Detailed but irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 A.M. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, just before 9 a.m.
He added that it will be a “CONCLUSIVE Report” after which “all charges should be dropped against me & others.”
The report in question, according to people familiar with the matter, is a document of more than 100 pages that was compiled at least in part by Liz Harrington, a Trump communications aide who is often described as among the true believers in his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.
The document focuses on what detractors of the election have insisted are widespread voting anomalies in Georgia during that campaign, the people said. It has been in the works for many weeks, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
Ms. Harrington has been making calls to people outside of Mr. Trump’s campaign about the event, according to two people familiar with the matter. She posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, four hours after Mr. Trump announced the news conference.
“Georgia has among the most corrupt elections in the country — and they haven’t gotten better since 2020, they’ve gotten worse!” she wrote. “Tune in Monday!”
Ms. Harrington declined to comment when contacted. She also appears, although unnamed, in a key scene detailed in Mr. Trump’s first federal indictment, over his mishandling of classified documents.
She was in the room with Mr. Trump at his home in Bedminster, N.J., in the summer of 2021, when the former president was recorded rustling through papers and discussing a sensitive military document that he lamented he could have declassified as president. Three people familiar with the matter said she is one of the women heard speaking in a recording of that conversation, a partial transcript of which appears in the indictment.
A wide variety of Mr. Trump’s past claims about fraud in Georgia have already been debunked, and it remains unclear precisely what will be in the report he mentioned in his post. It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump’s promised news conference will go forward on Monday, when the club is expected to be closed and holding only private events.
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, denounced Mr. Trump’s comments a short time after the former president posted them.
“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen,” Mr. Kemp wrote. “For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.’’
Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post came as people in his expansive orbit of lawyers and advisers have grown increasingly concerned about what he says publicly about the four criminal indictments he is facing. The judge overseeing his federal case over attempting to subvert the election has already warned Mr. Trump and his lawyers against making “inflammatory” statements that could compromise witnesses or the jury pool.
Mr. Trump’s decision to revisit his baseless claims about the 2020 election in such a high-profile setting — with a news conference devoted entirely to the topic — cuts against months of efforts by his allies and advisers to limit the extent to which he focuses on a subject that has already proved to be a political loser.
That is especially true after the 2022 midterm elections, when the candidates he endorsed and who promoted his claims of a stolen election fared poorly.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
