An unlikely trio of Trump supporters are now his defiant co-defendants
A pastor, a publicist and a political activist tried to convince an election worker to falsely confess to voter fraud. They, along with Trump, now face criminal charges in Georgia.
“I’m not going to plead out to a lie,” Lee said Thursday. “I’m not going to cooperate with evil. I’m not going to do something that is going to eat away or destroy our First Amendment rights … This is the Lord’s battle, and we’ve got to fight it.”
Lee is accused of conspiring with the hip-hop publicist Trevian Kutti and former Trump campaign staffer Harrison Floyd to try to coerce a Georgia election worker into falsely confessing to helping rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
This unlikely trio is among the least-known Trump supporters facing charges in Fulton County. Their indictments show how Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election pulled in Americans from many walks of life — not just elected officials and high-powered lawyers, but also low-level campaign staffers and ordinary supporters.
Even as more-prominent defendants, including the lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, have pleaded guilty in the case, these three have signaled that they are willing to stand by the former president as he continues to claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen, even if that means facing prison time. They have become inspirations to Trump’s most ardent fans, especially as they continue to fundraise to pay their lawyers.
It’s unclear how the three came together after the 2020 election — or what connections they had, if any, to the highest levels of the Trump campaign. But unlike other defendants who are accused of attacking democracy broadly, the three are alleged to have targeted an individual election worker in the Atlanta area, Ruby Freeman.
As Trump, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and others falsely targeted Freeman, the three offered to help her navigate the manufactured crisis. Prosecutors allege what they really wanted to do was create a justification for Republicans in Congress to reject the election results on Jan. 6, 2021.
The indictment details a top-to-bottom network: At the same time as Trump and his high-profile allies were pressuring governors, state lawmakers and members of Congress to take action to overturn the election, some of his lesser-known backers singled out those at the lowest end of the hierarchy of election administration, including Freeman.
Their alleged plan fizzled, and they are now charged alongside Trump with participating in a sprawling conspiracy to steal an American election. All three have pleaded not guilty to racketeering, influencing witnesses and conspiracy to solicit false statements. They could soon sit alongside the former president in a courtroom.
Kutti, the publicist, talks openly on social media about the headline-making experience, taunting detractors in memes and suggesting she should be Trump’s next press secretary. Floyd, the former Trump campaign aide, flustered prosecutors this summer when he ignored offers to negotiate bail and spent five nights in the notorious Fulton County Jail. Floyd is using this case to try to once again litigate whether the 2020 election was stolen, demanding access to voting machine records, absentee ballot envelopes and other materials long sought by election conspiracy theorists.
Conservative YouTube host Gary Franchi hit on that same theme as the emcee for Lee’s fundraiser on Thursday night not far from Chicago. “That election was stolen right out from under every single American,” Franchi said, despite a lack of evidence supporting that assertion about the 2020 results.
“I want each one of you to think: What can you give tonight?” Franchi asked the crowd of about 100. “How can you support this battle? Because it’s not just a battle for the pastor. This is a battle for the Constitution of the United States, for the rights that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights, handed down by our creator that are under direct assault by the devils who somehow find themselves in positions of power.”
He stretched his arm above his head and held up a $100 bill. “I’ll be the first. I have $100 right here,” he said. “Who can match me in this $100? Raise your hand if you can match this $100.”
Several hands went up.
‘Where’s Ruby?'
Nearly three years ago, at a Georgia legislative hearing a month after the election, an attorney volunteering for Trump’s campaign presented a snippet of grainy surveillance video of vote counting in downtown Atlanta. Trump supporters inaccurately said that it showed the poll workers, later identified as Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, conspiring to clear poll observers from the room so that they could produce “suitcases” filled with fraudulent ballots.
Georgia’s top election officials quickly debunked the claims, but Trump’s campaign and conservative media treated it as true and continued to spread it to their vast audiences.
Trump played the video at a rally in Georgia, and Giuliani amplified it on social media and in interviews.
Days after the president’s rally, Giuliani told Georgia lawmakers at another hearing that the footage showed the election workers exchanging USB memory sticks that he implied contained fraudulent vote counts, “as if they [were] vials of heroin or cocaine.” Freeman later said she had passed her daughter a ginger mint, not a memory stick.
Representatives for Trump and Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. In an ongoing defamation lawsuit, Giuliani recently stopped contesting as a legal matter that he made false statements about Freeman.
By mid-December, Freeman’s contact information was circulating, and Trump supporters were calling and sending vicious and racist messages. They told her that she was going to “rot in hell,” Freeman told House investigators. Some messages indicated that strangers knew where she lived, “And we’re coming to get you, n-----.”
She lived alone and was scared. People were showing up in her neighborhood, some with bullhorns, Freeman told investigators.
One of them was Lee, a preacher at a Lutheran church in suburban Chicago who drove 10 hours to Freeman’s house.
It was Dec. 14, 2020, the day that electoral college members in every state met and the same day that Republicans in Georgia and some other states signed official-looking paperwork falsely claiming that Trump had won their states.
A former police officer and law enforcement chaplain, Lee had counseled cops during some of the nation’s darkest hours, including the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Now, he was on a mission to help Trump, prosecutors allege.
Lee talked to Freeman’s neighbor and introduced himself as a minister, Freeman recounted during a call to 911.
“He thinks he can help me and my daughter out,” Freeman told the dispatcher.
Dressed in a black shirt and white clerical collar, Lee returned the next day. He rapped on her door, prompting her to peer through a bathroom window and call 911, as she had several other times since being falsely accused.
“I’m not here to hurt her,” Lee said when an officer approached him in his red Ford, according to body-camera footage first reported by Reuters last year. “I’m not here to cause any problems or anything like that.” He asked the officer if he would facilitate a meeting between him and Freeman.
“You may want to let her know that I’ve got some pro bono service for her, if she’s interested,” Lee said.
When she didn’t take him up on the offer, according to the indictment, Lee told Floyd that Freeman, who is Black, was afraid to talk to him because he is a White man. Floyd, who is Black, briefly ran as a GOP congressional candidate in the Atlanta area before directing Black Voices for Trump for the president’s campaign.
Lee has declined to say why he went to Georgia, but his lawyer on Thursday noted the pastor is drawn to disaster. “Why would he go down on Ground Zero? Why would he go to [Hurricane] Katrina? Why would he go to Columbine?” attorney David Shestokas said at Lee’s fundraiser. “Maybe it’s because there was chaos and crisis in America, you know, going on in Georgia at that time.”
After Lee’s visits to Freeman’s house, the efforts to coerce a false confession from Freeman seemed to soon subside.
Three weeks later, on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and urged him to disqualify enough votes to overturn his narrow loss. He invoked Freeman’s name 18 times, describing her as “a professional vote scammer and hustler,” and claimed without evidence that she alone “stuffed the ballot boxes” with enough “phony ballots” to change the election result.
“You know the internet? You know what was trending on the internet? ‘Where’s Ruby?' Because they thought she’d be in jail. ‘Where’s Ruby?’” Trump said, according to a recording of the call published by The Washington Post the next day.
The frenzied plan to obtain a confession from Freeman was underway again.
Floyd called Freeman twice in quick succession on the night of Jan. 3, but she didn’t pick up. He called Kutti, the publicist whom Floyd has said he met at a Trump rally. Over the next two hours, Floyd texted Freeman and traded a series of calls with Lee and Kutti, according to the indictment.
Floyd contacted Freeman because “he thought she needed help,” said one of Floyd’s attorneys, Chris Kachouroff. He didn’t say why Floyd believed she needed help or how he thought he could help her, but he said Floyd didn’t do anything wrong. “There’s not some grand conspiracy,” Kachouroff said in an interview.
The next day, Kutti traveled from Chicago to Atlanta and arrived unannounced at Freeman’s neighbor’s doorstep.
“I’m a crisis manager,” Kutti said, according to a recording Freeman played for police. “I work for some of the biggest names in the industry. I was given a call that she needed help in a situation and they flew me here to help her. We don’t have a lot of time, but I’m here. Let her know that we’re not affiliated with anything or anybody, but there are some things she should know, and she should know immediately.”
After calling the police, Freeman agreed to meet with Kutti at a nearby police station, according to the indictment. There, they spoke for more than an hour.
Kutti warned Freeman that something would happen soon that “will disrupt your freedom,” according to footage from a nearby police officer’s body camera. “You are a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up,” she told Freeman.
Kutti’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, declined to explain the comment, but said that Kutti had not done anything illegal. “I think everything done by my client was done honestly, openly,” he said. “She talked to this lady at a police station with someone filming — an officer filming the whole thing. There’s obviously no criminal intent and I think there’s First Amendment problems [with the prosecution].”
Kutti told Freeman she was going to call Floyd, saying he had “authoritative powers to get you protection.” Sitting silently by Kutti throughout the conversation was Garrison Douglas, who had chauffeured the publicist around town and had worked with Floyd at Black Voices for Trump. Douglas, who now works as a spokesman for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), said he “had no involvement in the meeting beyond the task of driving, and I testified to that fact to the Fulton County special grand jury.”
Much of the interaction occurred off-camera because the officer stepped away when Kutti said that they were trying to have “a conversation between private citizens.”
The discussion ended when Freeman leaped out of her chair and told Kutti, “The devil is a liar,” Freeman told Reuters in 2021. After their conversation at the police station, she looked up Kutti’s name online and discovered that she was a Trump supporter.
Freeman felt betrayed. The experience left her feeling even more unsafe, even in her own home, said those familiar with her thinking at the time.
“Lo and behold, when someone as powerful as the President of the United States eggs on a mob, that mob will come,” Freeman told the House committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol. “They came for us with their cruelty, their threats, their racism. …”
Kutti, the publicist
After the three were indicted in August, Kutti was the first to turn herself in for processing. For her booking photo, the 53-year-old wore a camouflage jacket and smiled widely. She promptly posted it on her Instagram account.
“Freedom,” she wrote, “is not free.”
Before Kutti backed Trump, she supported Hillary Clinton, donating $3,575 to her 2008 run for president.
By 2020, she was holding a Black Voices for Trump sign at the Trump rally in Tulsa in the early stages of the deadly pandemic. The coalition drew advisers like Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That year, Kutti ran the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Angela Stanton-King, the goddaughter of Alveda King and a QAnon-promoting former reality TV star from Georgia whom Trump pardoned for a 2004 conspiracy conviction related to a car-theft ring.
Kutti once represented R&B singer R. Kelly, who is serving a 30-year prison sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking, and rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, whom she cheered in 2020 when he made a long-shot bid for president. Kutti, who has worked as a lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Illinois, midway through 2020 began posting less on Instagram about the entertainment industry and more about the MAGA movement and her place in it.
“NEW CLIENT ALERT: Just inked Mike Lindell on a Gulfstream G650,” Kutti posted on social media in the summer of 2020.
Lindell, the MyPillow founder and prominent election denier, told The Post that he had never hired Kutti “and only met her once.”
Days before she showed up on Freeman’s doorstep, Kutti posted a mash-up of photos from 2020 that showed her proximity to high-profile Trump supporters, including Floyd. She captioned the photo: “The smartest black man in politics.”
She also had a message for the president: “if you are going to bring us Patriots to D.C. on January 6th, you better unleash every military and Executive power you have to save our Republic. DO IT,” she posted on Instagram.
Floyd, the political activist
Floyd was the next of the three to surrender. He live-streamed his drive toward downtown Atlanta with the caption: “Lord Protect Me While Im In These Streets.”
While the other defendants negotiated their bail ahead of time to avoid being detained, Floyd showed up at the jail and “basically just begged to be booked in,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis told one of Floyd’s lawyers, according to a recording obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Floyd’s attorney disputed that account.
A booking photo shows Floyd, 39, in a dress shirt and suit coat. He appeared later at a virtual court hearing wearing a navy blue jail-issued uniform.
He alleged that he was kept behind bars for five nights because he is Black. He said at a news conference that Willis, who is Black, gave him “a Negro wake-up call because she is reminding me that our country and the state of Georgia will not be able to be a righteous nation if we stand on pillars of corruption, racism, lying and cheating.”
Floyd, a former Marine machine-gunner, announced he was exploring moving back to Georgia from Maryland so he could again run for Congress: “I’m coming back here to get things right.”
The comments attracted wide acclaim from MAGA influencers, along with thousands of dollars for his defense fund. He has insisted on his innocence and suggested he would produce evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, despite repeated reviews confirming Biden’s victory. Floyd has not responded to requests for comment.
Floyd was paid about $136,000 by Trump’s campaign for a year and a half of work on outreach to Black voters, according to campaign finance records. His time on the payroll ended just before he joined up with Kutti and Lee, according to indictment and campaign finance records.
In February, FBI agents served Floyd with a federal grand jury subpoena as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s separate investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Floyd slammed into one of the agents and knocked him back as he swore at him, according to a misdemeanor assault charge that was filed against Floyd. That case is pending.
During his first court appearance in the Georgia case, Floyd said he had been told that hiring an attorney would cost $40,000 to $200,000 — far more than he could afford. Soon afterward, right-wing activist Laura Loomer and others urged people to help him. Within weeks, he raised more than $325,000.
During an interview on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast in late August, Floyd doubled down on his attacks on government institutions.
“Fulton County fumbled the coverup, and I am aware of what transpired and they’re trying to put pressure on me and others to make sure that the truth doesn’t come out,” he said. “I’m looking forward to being down here fighting the devil in Georgia.”
Lee, the pastor
Lee was the last of the 19 defendants to turn himself in. Wearing his clerical collar, he looked subdued in his mug shot. He did not have enough money to post his bond and his attorney said he stayed out of jail only because of a last-minute donation from conservative talk show host Rochelle “Silk” Richardson.
Lee started his career in law enforcement, then went to seminary in the 1980s and formed the nonprofit Police Officer Ministries.
Lee and his attorney would not say when or how Lee came to know Floyd and Kutti.
Lee’s backers have dubbed him “America’s chaplain.” An Illinois-based Christian group said it has raised about $20,000 for him, in part by selling Trump-shaped bottles of honey to raise money for his legal defense, and supporters are urged to use the promotional code “chaplain.”
Lee expressed support for Trump early on, writing in a February 2017 email to supporters of his ministry that he had talked to someone from Trump’s transition team about creating a volunteer police chaplaincy program. He included a photo of himself standing in front of Trump Tower. “The president has issued a clarion call to make America great again and drain the swamp,” the report said. “No matter how we voted in the recent election, we should all support these noble goals.”
Lee typically avoids politicking from the pulpit. On the Sunday after he was indicted, he remarked on the partisan divides that often tear apart America’s civic discourse. “Some people actually pour gas on the fire and view conflict as an opportunity to push a particular agenda,” he preached.
On the Sunday after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Lee did not discuss the assault on America’s seat of democracy but touched on conservatives’ questions about the results of the 2020 election.
“Were there irregularities?” he asked. “Was there fraud? Is it conspiracy theory? Is this group crazy? Is that group crazy? … Some problems just seem intractable.”
Two and a half years later, as the fundraiser for his legal defense fund wound down, Lee wrapped his arm around his wife of four decades and bowed his head. Members of the audience raised their arms to bless the couple.
“See, we’re going to trouble them by our prayers,” Latasha Fields, the founder of a Christian home-schooling support group, preached. “We’re going to weary Georgia in the name of Jesus. We’re going to weary the judges in the name of Jesus.”
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez reported from Phoenix and Adriana Usero reported from Washington. Alice Crites, Amy Gardner, Holly Bailey and Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.
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