Schram: Truth shatters a Big Lie

You will remember this was one of the most riveting and controversial cases we saw during the House Jan. 6 Committee hearings. It featured Giuliani and Trump making accusatory statements and derogatory assertions alleging misconduct by two volunteer Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss. Now Giuliani has conceded that his statements were false and defamatory in nature — but he is contending that, as Trump’s lawyer, he had the First Amendment right to make those statements.

At this point, we need to also explain something that, in a more perfect world, should never be necessary or relevant: Freeman and her grown daughter are both Black. Unfortunately when you check out the words of Giuliani and Trump, you’ll see their racial identity seems infuriatingly relevant.

Here’s how Giuliani described what he saw them do in a video that obviously was severely edited (maybe also: doctored): He said Freeman and Moss were “quite surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine. And they are still walking around Georgia lying. They should have been questioned already. Their places of work, their houses should have been searched.” (Freeman later testified they weren’t passing around USB sticks. So what was it we saw her give her daughter? “A ginger mint,” she said.)

Then-President Trump defamed Freeman in his infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call when he asked Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him “find” 11,800 more votes. He said it showed her mishandling votes: “She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler.”

You’ll probably remember Freeman tearfully telling the hearing: “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” And her daughter, Moss, testifying she’d received “a lot of threats wishing death upon me … a lot of them were racist. A lot of them were just hateful.”

Now that you’ve heard how Giuliani and Trump chose to talk about Freeman and Moss, try to imagine the vocabulary those two men might have been moved to use if they had been watching two very different Georgia women volunteering to process Fulton County’s votes. Picture in your mind’s eye that they’d just seen Mayberry’s Aunt Bea give something small to her daughter, played by, say, Mary Tyler Moore.

Do you think Giuliani would have suggested Aunt Bea just gave Mary Tyler Moore heroin or cocaine? And can you conjure Trump calling Aunt Bea a “scammer and hustler”?

Neither can I. And, for that matter, I can’t imagine such talk being acceptable to any of the rock-solid, strong-for-Trump citizens I’ve talked with who live in the heartland. They believed those videos were proof of vote-stealing — because Giuliani, Trump and others told them it was.

Now Giuliani has conceded that what he told them about that Georgia video was a Big Lie. What always made them mad as hell was when they believed their government lied to their face. Last week’s news was the last thing they ever expected to get from their own MAGA World.