- A Georgia election worker told the January 6 committee about how her family was targeted.
- Wandrea "Shaye" Moss said she and her mother had to leave town for two months at the FBI's recommendation.
- They said they faced racist death threats, and some election deniers tried to citizen's arrest the worker's grandmother.
A Georgia election worker testified that her grandmother faced a citizen's arrest by a group of election deniers who tried pushing their way into her house due to election lies told by former President Donald Trump and former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, an election worker in Fulton County, Georgia, told lawmakers during a January 6 select committee hearing that she and her mother Ruby Freeman, who worked as a short-term election worker in 2020, were among the workers counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
When Giuliani and Trump accused those workers of orchestrating election fraud, Moss said her family faced death threats and were pushed out of town, living in Airbnbs for two months around January 6 at the FBI's recommendation.
"I felt horrible," she said during the hearing. "I felt homeless. I can't believe this person has caused this much damage to me and my family to have to leave my home."
Moss said she endured racist harassment as well, adding that a group of people influenced by the election conspiracies showed up to her grandmother's house and tried to perform a citizen's arrest.
"I've never even heard her or seen her cry ever in my life and she called me screaming at the top of her lungs," Moss said. "She was just screaming, I didn't know what to do. I wasn't there. I just felt so helpless and so horrible."
In December 2021, Freeman and Moss sued right-wing website The Gateway Pundit and its founder Jim Hoft alongside his brother Joe Hoft, accusing them of defamation and intentional inflection of emotional distress.
The lawsuit claimed that the website outed Freeman and Moss to its readers, sharing surveillance footage of them and accusing them or toying with the results of the elections.
Freeman was mentioned more than a dozen times in Trump's January 2 call to Georgia officials, where he asked them to "find" more votes, which she said forced her and her daughter to go into hiding.
"I've lost my name and I lost my reputation," her mother, Ruby Freeman told lawmakers during the hearing. "I've lost my sense of security. All because a group of people starting with number 45 and his allies, Rudy Giuliani, decided to scapegoat me and my daughter Shaye."
Moss would later receive a "Profile in Courage" Award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in 2022.