A top election official in Georgia took aim at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., for spreading “disproven conspiracies” after she falsely claimed during a House panel on election integrity that former President Donald Trump won the state within the 2020 election.
“I had a discussion with the Election Integrity Caucus. A giant a part of that’s talking truthfully concerning the challenges in elections and identifying REAL issues,” wrote Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in a tweet Tuesday night.
“Some still deal in disproven conspiracies. It is a challenge all of us face, but having a @CocaCola makes all the things higher,” Sterling tweeted alongside a screenshot of him taking a deep swig of soda while seated next to Greene.
Sterling, who got here into the national highlight when he denounced false claims of election fraud in Georgia after the 2020 election, was certainly one of several elections officers who appeared Tuesday before the GOP-led House Election Integrity Caucus. Greene is a member of the group.
The roundtable discussion was intended to handle “election administration best practices,” said a press release from Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Latest York Republican and the caucus co-chair. “Panelists discussed what went right of their states in the course of the 2022 election and raised a variety of ideas for improving elections as we look ahead to 2024.”
Greene on Tuesday evening posted a video from that event that showed her turning to Sterling and criticizing him directly.
“Gabe, I don’t consider you an authority on this issue. As a matter of fact, I consider you a significant problem,” Greene said.
She floated an array of disputed claims about election fraud in Georgia’s 2020 general election, starting with the claim that her ex-husband had showed as much as vote in person and was told he had already voted by absentee ballot.
“Nobody gave a s— about what happened to him,” Greene said, claiming that many others had reported the identical issue.
Greene then made the repeatedly disproven assertion that there have been “hundreds” of dead voters whose ballots were counted in Georgia.
Sterling interjected: “There have been 4.”
Greene continued her broadside. She told Sterling he has “continuously shilled for this election” and claimed there was “complete and total fraud and you already know it.”
“I’ll follow up with yet one more thing: Trump won Georgia,” Greene said, before voicing more election conspiracies, including the debunked claim that “suitcases” filled with ballots were secretly scanned in Atlanta. Sterling and Raffensperger said in sworn testimony last yr that that conspiracy theory was false.
Greene’s tweet presented the video as a present “on behalf of President Trump and all of his voters in Georgia.”
On Wednesday morning, Sterling tweeted one other version of the photo of him drinking soda next to Greene, this one mocked up with the old Coca-Cola slogan, “Have a Coke and a smile.”
The offices of Tenney and the Georgia secretary of state didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Greene responded to Sterling’s tweets by reiterating among the congresswoman’s criticisms of Georgia’s election.
Trump never conceded the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. He engaged in quite a few failed attempts to overturn his losses in key swing states, including Georgia, and spread a big selection of false or unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.
Sterling, a Republican, issued a fiery rebuke of Trump in late 2020 for staying silent as Georgia was flooded with threats against people overseeing the state’s elections.
“Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone goes to get hurt, someone goes to get shot, someone goes to get killed,” Sterling said on the time.
Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss culminated within the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and compelled lawmakers to flee their chambers.
Trump stays a significant figure within the Republican Party and is currently a number one contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
