Reply To: January 6th Committee Hearings

Shaye Moss’s life forever changed on Dec. 10, 2020, when Rudy Giuliani, then President Donald Trump’s top campaign lawyer, publicly claimed that she and her mother, a fellow poll worker in Fulton County, Ga., had rigged the outcome in her state.

Moss’s supervisor suggested that day that she check her social media accounts to see if she had received any threats, as others in the office had. She was stunned by what she saw when she pulled up her Facebook Messenger account.

“It was just a lot of horrible things there,” Moss said at a hearing Tuesday before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Many of the messages were racist and “hateful,” said Moss, who is Black. “A lot of threats wishing death upon me, telling me I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’ ”

Both she and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were forced into hiding.

Moss said she was speechless when her supervisors showed her a recording of Giuliani’s statement to a Georgia state Senate committee investigating the 2020 result. Giuliani claimed that Moss and Freeman had plotted to kick out observers at the State Farm Arena, where the county had set up a ballot counting operation. They had brought in suitcases filled with fraudulent ballots for Biden and scanned them through the tabulating teams multiple times, he said. He described surveillance video from the arena that he claimed showed the two exchanging USB memory sticks, presumably containing fraudulent vote counts, “as if they’re vials of cocaine.”

“I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s a criminal investigator or prosecutor that they are engaged in surreptitious, illegal activity,” Giuliani said. “And they’re still walking around Georgia. They should have been questioned already. Their homes should have been searched for evidence.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the questioning at Tuesday’s hearing, asked Moss: “None of that was true, was it?”

Moss’s answer: “None of it.”

Schiff then asked about the USB memory sticks.

“What was your mom actually handing you on that video?”

“A ginger mint,” Moss said.

Trump also attacked Freeman and Moss personally in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) just days before the Capitol attack, mentioning Freeman 18 times and describing her at one point as a “professional vote scammer and hustler.” The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call and published it last year.