He couldn’t put the microphone in front of him to work. At first he struggled to find the words to express himself.
But as the former Georgia election worker revealed her story of being unfairly attacked by then-President Donald Trump and her lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday before the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, she became the witness. more powerful than he appeared in these public hearings. Bye now.
Moss and his mother, Ruby Freeman, had been working with relative anonymity in Fulton County until, without warning, Giuliani and Trump noticed that they had somehow taken action that was a positive test of the stealing votes for Democrats in the 2020 election.
Trump called Freeman a “professional voter scammer” and a “scammer.” Giuliani said Moss and Freeman had been going through USB ports as “cocaine or heroin vials.” (Moss told the audience on Tuesday that his mother had been handing him a “ginger mint,” not a USB drive).
Following those false and racist allegations, Moss detailed how people had tried to break into her grandmother’s house and how Trump’s supporters had harmed her and her mother. (Her mother, who was known as “Lady Ruby,” said she no longer liked being called that.) Moss said of the threats she had received: “Many of them were racist. Many were just hateful.” .
“I haven’t been anywhere,” she said through tears.
His testimony brought home a powerful point that is too often lost when we talk about the logistics of who knew what and when on January 6: The lies told by the former president and his colleagues had real – and profoundly negative – impacts. -. about the lives of people who were, in fact, innocent spectators.
The point: The life of Moss, and that of his mother, changes unchanged due to Trump’s unwillingness to accept that he had lost an election. And that’s a fucking shame.