A pro-Trump operative who was caught on tape participating in a Georgia voting system breach after the 2020 election has testified before the special grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the outcome in that state, two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.
Scott Hall, a Georgia bail bondsman and Fulton County Republican poll watcher who was captured on surveillance video the same day the breach happened and acknowledged he gained access to a voting machine, testified as a witness for over three hours last week in the state-level probe overseen by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the sources said.
Hall’s appearance before the grand jury has not been previously reported.
On January 7, 2021, the day after the attack on the US Capitol, Hall and others connected to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell spent hours inside a restricted area of the Coffee County elections office, where they set up computers near election equipment and appeared to access voting data.
Willis’s criminal investigation recently expanded to include the breach of voting systems in the deeply-red Coffee County by operatives working for Powell.
Hall did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
According to court documents obtained by CNN, Hall’s role investigating supposed voter fraud in Georgia is also referenced in a November 2020 email that the head of Trump’s election day operations in Georgia received from the state’s Republican Party Chairman.
“Scott Hall has been looking into the election on behalf of the President at the request of David Bossie. I know him,” David Shafer, the Georgia Republican Party chairman wrote on November 20, 2020, to Robert Sinners, the head of Trump’s Georgia election day operations.
Shafer, who was among the 16 individuals who served as a fake Trump elector in Georgia, has been informed he is a target in the Fulton County DA’s criminal investigation.
Bossie, a long-time Republican operative who served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager during the 2016 presidential election, is a close ally of the former President and was initially tapped to lead his post-2020 election legal challenges.
While Bossie was effectively sidelined as leader of the Trump campaign’s litigation push just a few weeks after Election Day, according to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril,” he remains a prominent member of the Republican Party, having served as the GOP national committeeman for Maryland.
Bossie is also Hall’s brother-in-law, according to two sources familiar with their relationship.
Bossie did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
“Wild theories”
During his recent deposition as part of a separate civil case related to election security in Georgia, Sinners was asked about his knowledge of the Coffee County breach.
Sinners, who is currently the Director of Communications for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, told CNN that he continues to comply with the investigations to the best of his ability, and that his deposition in the civil case shows that he didn’t know anything about the data breach at the Coffee County elections office.
In his recent deposition, Sinners said that he spoke on the phone with Hall for less than a few minutes in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Georgia bail bondsman had some “wild theories.”
“I did not believe that he was an authoritative source of election information,” Sinners said about Hall, according to court documents.
Asked why he didn’t flag authorities about Hall, Sinners said, “If I had reached out to law enforcement about every single wing nut conspiracy theory that somebody contacted me about, I would still be there until next Christmas,” according to court documents.
Shafer told CNN that he didn’t want to comment on the Fulton County special grand jury investigation at this time, but noted that the reason he emailed Sinners in November 2020 was because Hall had asked the Georgia Republican Party for a list of complaints received by voters who claimed to have cast absentee ballots when they had not actually done so.
