On Tuesday, a man named Scott Graham Hall became one of the first defendants charged with conspiracy in Georgia to surrender. Certainly not a household name before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s bombshell indictment, the Atlanta bail bondsman has been accused of helping illegally interfere with voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia, in January 2021. On Tuesday he was processed and promptly released on bond.
Hall’s surrender is just the beginning of this legal process, of course. But his alleged crimes echo another ill-conceived plot from the 1970s. More than 50 years ago, the hapless criminal conduct of the White House’s so-called Plumbers was a major element of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. This off-the-books unit was behind an illegal scheme to burglarize the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers. The incompetence of the Plumbers was both oddly comedic and politically dangerous to Nixon.
Picture G. Gordon Liddy, a White House aide, decked out in a wig, carrying fake IDs and hobbling around in special shoes that caused him to limp (all parts of a disguise allegedly provided by a CIA agent) as he surveilled Fielding’s office, and it’s hard not to chuckle. But the crime they planned was reprehensible. The Plumbers team of Egil Krogh, Liddy and Howard Hunt were convicted of conspiracy to violate Fielding’s civil rights. More significantly, that scheme offered a window into a political philosophy that saw the president as above the law.
The media today has understandably focused on the charges against former President Donald Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. But the felony charges against little-known Georgia residents Hall, Cathy Latham and Misty Hampton — who have been charged with conspiracy to commit election fraud, computer fraud, illegal access to voting machines and invasion of privacy — reveal the extent of the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the election. Their brazen intrusion and the futility of their efforts recall the Plumbers’ escapades.
Both Nixon’s Plumbers and the Coffee County Three tried to seize sensitive information. In his autobiography, “Will,” Liddy wrote that the burglars made a thorough search of Fielding’s office but found no files on Ellsberg. Liddy called the operation a “dry hole” but added that he wasn’t discouraged by the operation’s failure.
The Trump loyalists who breached the voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, made little effort to conceal their activities.
Perhaps that bravado contributed to Liddy’s proposal, in early 1972, for an “intelligence program” that included electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters. Once approved, Liddy’s plan led to the infamous Watergate burglary. And it was the need to subsequently hide the existence of the Plumbers — whose members, Liddy and Hunt, oversaw the burglary — that was a key factor in the Watergate cover-up.
In July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee found that the Plumbers acted with White House approval and voted three articles of impeachment against Nixon, leading to his resignation. The committee’s final report states: “The President said on May 22, 1973, that his concern that activities of the Plumbers might be exposed was one reason for ordering [White House chief of staff Robert] Haldeman and [adviser John] Ehrlichman to insure that the Watergate investigations did not lead to their disclosure.”
The Trump loyalists who breached the voting machines in Coffee County, Georgia, made little effort to conceal their activities. Surveillance video outside the election office shows Latham escorting members of the tech firm hired by the Trump campaign into the building where the voting machines were kept, while video taken inside shows Trump loyalists and the techs handling the voting equipment.
Hall, who was indicted for conspiracy to commit election fraud and other computer privacy offenses, was recorded in March 2021 admitting that this team “scanned every freaking ballot” in Coffee County and “imaged all the hard drives” of every piece of voting equipment. (Multiple audits of Georgia’s 2020 election have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.)
Hall’s audio seems to have prompted the investigation by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into allegations of a voting machine breach in Coffee County, according to state attorneys cited in a Washington Post report. Raffensperger had said that Hampton, the now-indicted former elections director for Coffee County, had not been truthful when questioned by his investigators.
The bumbling of the Coffee County Three doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the alleged crimes to violate individual rights, any more than it did when the Plumbers violated the law on Nixon’s behalf.
Krogh warned in 2007 against the mindset of government officials that justifies illegality by government officials: “The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it.”
The dangerous philosophy that motivated the Plumbers and other convicted officials of the Watergate scandal is very much still with us. Just as the rule of law punished the guilty almost five decades ago, the prosecutions of those who broke the law to do Trump’s bidding must succeed in order to preserve our democracy.
It is no laughing matter.
CORRECTION (Aug. 23, 4:00 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the timeline for the secretary of state’s investigation into a voting machine breach in Coffee County. The investigation seems to have been launched after audio of Scott Hall was played for secretary of state officials, not before. The article also misspelled the Georgia secretary of state’s last name. He is Brad Raffensperger, not Raffensberger.