A decorated economics teacher, an Atlanta-area bail bondsman, a police chaplain who provided religious support at “Ground Zero” after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a former mixed martial arts fighter, a one-time publicist for Kanye West, a pool builder-turned-state senator.
These are among the 18 allies of Donald Trump who were indicted by a Georgia grand jury on Monday night, along with the former president.
While several of the names in the indictment are likely familiar to people who have kept up with Trump’s various legal cases — Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, and Jenna Ellis are all in there — some of the defendants are lesser-known figures.
Cathy Latham, for example, is a former chair of the Republican Party in lightly populated Coffee County in southeast Georgia, who is accused of coordinating with other Trump allies to access the county’s election office to tamper with ballot tabulating machines and to copy voter data. Before she made headlines as a Trump accomplice, Latham made headlines in the Douglas Now news for being named the 2019 Georgia Economics Teacher of the Year and for leading her students on a spring break trip to New York in 2016 to learn about financial markets.
Stephen Cliffgard Lee is accused of traveling to Georgia to pressure a Fulton County elections worker to fess up about alleged election fraud. According to a Reuters report, Lee is a former California law enforcement officer-turned-Lutheran chaplain, who claims to have provided religious support to “Ground Zero” first responders after the 9/11 attacks.
Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator, is accused of being one of the alleged fake Trump electors. He owns a swimming pool construction company in Georgia and a whitewater rafting company in North Carolina. His re-election website says he decided to run for office because he has “achieved the American dream” and wants to “help others achieve what I have.”
The allegations against the lesser-known defendants primarily focus on those three areas: the plot to access the Coffee County elections office and to gather voting data, the effort to pressure the Fulton elections worker, and the alleged fake-electors plot.
Breaching the Coffee County Elections System
Latham, Emily “Misty” Hampton, and Scott Graham Hall are among the lesser-known defendants who are accused of being involved with the breach of the Coffee County elections office and accessing its voting equipment in January 2021.
Latham, a retired economics teacher and state education consultant, was the chair of the Coffee County Republicans at the time.
Hampton, was the Coffee County election supervisor who wrote a “Letter of invitation” to Trump allies, including Powell and members of the Trump-aligned data forensics firm Sullivan Strickler, to access the deep-red, rural county’s elections systems, according to media reports.
Hall, the head of Anytime Bail Bonding in Georgia — and the former president of both the Georgia Association of Professional bondmen and the Professional Bondsmen of the United States — is also accused of being involved in the plan to access the elections system.
According to the indictment, Latham, Hampton, Hall, and Powell tampered with the electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines, took information and data that was the property of Dominion Voting Systems, and examined voter data without authority.
According to a 2022 Associated Press report, interior security camera footage from the Coffee County elections office showed that Latham “welcomed a computer forensics team when it arrived on Jan. 7, 2021, introduced the team to local election officials and spent nearly all day there. She also instructed the team what to copy, which turned out to be ‘virtually every component of the voting system.’”
Hampton resigned from the elections office in February 2021 in lieu of termination.
Latham, Hampton, and Hall are all facing a variety of conspiracy charges, along with violating Georgia’s RICO Act. Latham is also facing charges for her role as an alleged fake elector.
Pressuring a Fulton County Elections Worker
Lee, the Lutheran chaplain, along with Harrison William Prescott Floyd, and Trevian C. Kutti, are accused of pressuring Fulton County elections worker Ruby Freeman to get her to falsely admit to committing election fraud.
According to Reuters, Lee was a sergeant with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office in California in the 1980s, he founded a Christian ministry to serve law-enforcement officers and their families in the 1990s, and more recently he led a “Quick Response Team” sponsored by a Lutheran church in Illinois. Lee has claimed to have provided religious support to first responders at “Ground Zero” after the 9/11 attacks.
Floyd is a former mixed martial arts fighter who led the “Black Voices for Trump” group, the New York Times reported. Kutti is a former publicist for Kanye West and R. Kelly.
According to Reuters, Lee repeatedly attempted to reach Freeman in mid-December 2020, including traveling to her home and speaking to her neighbors, part of a campaign to pressure her to admit to election wrongdoing. Trump’s allies had accused Freeman and her daughter of pulling fake ballots from suitcases during the vote-counting process in Atlanta.
According to the indictment, Lee solicited Floyd to speak with Freeman. Lee claimed that she was afraid to talk with him because he was white. Floyd in turn recruited Kutti to travel from Chicago to Atlanta to contact Freeman, the indictment states. According to the indictment, Kutti and Floyd told Freeman that “she needed protection and purported to offer her help.” According to Reuters, Kutti told Freeman she “was in danger” and had 48 hours to speak with her before “unknown subjects” turned up at her home. Freeman later claimed that a mob of angry Trump supporters did surrounded her home, shouting at her through bullhorns.
Lee, Floyd, and Kutti are all facing charges of influencing witnesses, conspiracy to commit solicitation of false statements and writings, and violation of Georgia’s RICO Act.
The Alleged Fake-Elector Plot
Still, Latham, and David Shafer, a former state senator and then-chair of the Georgia Republican Party, are among the defendants accused of being involved in a plot to file fake electoral votes in an effort to keep Trump in power.
Still was the finance chair for the Georgia GOP in 2020, and was elected to the state senate in 2022 representing the Atlanta suburbs. Raised in Jacksonville, Florida, Still was a swimmer at the University of Alabama. He moved to Atlanta in 1998 to work in the healthcare industry. He now owns a pool business in Gwinnett County, Georgia, as well as Endless River Adventures in Bryson City, North Carolina, according to his campaign website.
Still is currently running for reelection to the state senate.
As chair of the Georgia GOP in 2020, Shafer was involved in Trump’s legal challenges in the state. On December 14, when the Trump electors met in the state capitol building, Shafer appeared on TV to explain what they were doing. He said that if the Republican voters hadn’t met that day, and if Trump eventually won in court and the Georgia elections had been reversed, it wasn’t clear that their votes could be recorded and counted later.
“In order for the lawsuit to remain viable,” he told a local Fox affiliate, “we were required to hold this meeting.”
Lawyers who spoke with National Review last year, including lawyers involved with the Georgia case, said the Trump electors were acting on the advice of their legal counsel, and their actions were backed up with a historic precedent — Hawaii’s 1960 presidential election that swung from Richard Nixon to John F. Kennedy.
Shafer’s legal team told National Review on Tuesday that “David Shafer is totally innocent of the charges filed against him yesterday in Fulton County Superior Court. His conduct regarding the 2020 Presidential election was lawful, appropriate and specifically authorized by the U.S. Constitution, federal and state law and long standing legal precedent.”
Still, Shafer, and Latham are facing charges involving forgery, making false statements, impersonating a public officer, filing false documents, and violating the RICO Act.
Another lesser-known defendant, Georgia personal injury lawyer, Robert Cheeley, is accused of helping to arrange the slate of fake electors, as well as with falsely telling state leaders that Fulton County election workers voted the same ballots “over and over again,” actions that he said “should shock the conscience of every red blooded Georgian.”
Cheeley is a managing partner with the Cheeley Law Group in Alpharetta, Ga. According to the firm’s website, Cheeley has “secured hundreds of millions of dollars in jury verdicts and negotiated settlements,” including for the families of nursing students killed in a 2015 crash and for women who were diagnosed with cancer after using a Johnson & Johnson talcum powder. He’s also obtained large settlements and verdicts against General Motors, Suzuki, and Toyota, according to the firm.
Cheeley recently shared two Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posts on his Facebook page about “industrial-controlled agriculture” and the border crisis. “What a mess Biden created at our border!” Cheeley wrote earlier this month.
Cheeley is facing a variety of conspiracy charges, along with charges involving making false statements, soliciting a public officer to make an oath violation, perjury, and violating the state’s RICO Act.