Trump allies arranged the copying of voting machine data from battleground states, report says

(CNN) - Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys hired computer experts to copy sensitive data from voting machines in multiple battleground states, including Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.

That’s according to the Washington Post, which got emails and other records that were collected from a subpoena to the forensics firm hired to obtain the information.

The subpoena is from a lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting systems.

It is the first confirmation that data from Georgia’s election system was copied, and the Washington Post said it shows these efforts were more organized than people initially thought.

“That entire hard drives of election systems software, election systems used to this day across the state of Georgia, and elsewhere were copied and then shared among a constellation of Trump allies,” said Aaron C. Davis, reporter with the Washington Post.

“And we, you know, if you look back at the early days after the election, it seems so frenetic, almost as if anybody, you know, working or interested in trying to support Trump’s ideas were just taking on their own volition to do something,” he added. “These documents show it was in fact organized, that attorneys -- in one case an outside counsel for the Trump campaign, another case Sydney Powell, were directing these computer forensic experts to go into states and, whenever they had the help of a local elections official, to go in there and copy as much as they possibly could.”

It is unclear if any of these breaches could be criminal. Courts permitted the examinations in at least two counties.

According to the Washington Post, “There is growing concern among experts that officials sympathetic to Trump’s claims of vote-rigging could undermine election security in the name of protecting it.”

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