Lawyers for one of those defendants, Harrison Floyd, appeared in court Friday morning to argue that their client is entitled to thousands of pages of election records from Fulton County and the Georgia secretary of state.
“They opened the door — we didn’t,” Chris Kachouroff, one of Floyd’s lawyers, argued during the hearing — a reference to the Fulton prosecution team’s language in the indictment stating that Trump lost. “We have the right to rebut that.”
To do so, Floyd’s lawyers argued, they must be allowed access to some of the same material for which election conspiracy theorists have been clamoring for years: cast-vote records from voting machines, ballot reports, every envelope received with absentee ballots, every absentee ballot application and much more.
The argument serves as a major test of the breadth of the Fulton indictment. Because prosecutors have alleged that Floyd and the other defendants “knowingly” lied, his lawyers say they have the right to try to prove it wasn’t a lie at all.
The issue could also test Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case and has shown a tendency for discipline and tight deadlines. Floyd’s defense strategy gives McAfee a potential opportunity to rule from a courtroom that the 2020 election was not stolen — or, in the alternative, to give election deniers space to make their preferred defense, but in the process potentially giving them a new platform to disseminate false claims and further complicate an already sprawling case.
In their brief, Floyd’s lawyers indicated plans to examine many of the same claims that circulated in 2020 among Trump loyalists but were dismissed in multiple court cases — that tens of thousands of votes weren’t verified, that some ballots were counted two or three times, and that a “legion” of other irregularities “clearly affected the result.”