IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF ST. LOUIS CITY, MISSOURI
TWENTY-SECOND JUDICIAL CIRCUIT
RUBY FREEMAN and WANDREA MOSS,
Plaintiffs,
v.
James Hoft, [DELETE], Joseph Hoft [DELETE] and TGP Communications LLC d/b/a The Gateway Pundit,
Serve on: James Hoft [DELETE]
Defendants.
PETITION
Plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, through their attomeys, bring this Petition against Defendants James Hof, Joseph Hoft, and TGP Communications LLC d/b/a The Gateway. Pundit (collectively, “Defendants”.
INTRODUCTION
1. The intentional dissemination of known falsehoods aimed at sowing doubt about the integrity of our elections threatens our very ability to function as a democracy. These falsehoods also destroy the lives of America’s election workers, whose service to our system of government places them in the crosshairs of those who seek to undermine it with their disinformation. Plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss have been the targets of such a campaign of lies, accused by Defendants James Hoft, Joseph Hoft, and The Gateway Pundit of committing ballot fraud to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. The lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have not only devastated their personal and professional reputations but instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.
2. The Gateway Pundit presents itself as an online news source committed to responsible journalism: “All our content should be true. No value is more important than this.”1 But The Gateway Pundit’s stock in trade is spreading disinformation, including lies about the integrity of the 2020 election. According to NewsGuard, a company that rates journalistic credibility, during the 2020 presidential election The Gateway Pundit regularly featured “false reports, conspiracy theories, and unfounded allegations, with no distinction made between opinions and actual news reports.”2
3. In fact, Defendants are among the leading purveyors of false information in the United States, spreading baseless conspiracy theories and disinformation for fame and fortune. The Gateway Pundit has been identified as the top producer of false content during and after the 2020 presidential election. In the fourth quarter of 2020, The Gateway Pundit raked in ad revenue by achieving 7.2 million shares on social media of its bogus election fraud stories—far more than the social media shares for such national news sites such as The Washington Post, NBC News and NPR.3
4. This action seeks to hold Defendants accountable for just some of their knowing lies—their false and endlessly repeated accusations that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss committed election fraud by, among other things, conspiring to empty the room where they were counting ballots of poll watchers, producing secret “suitcases” full of illegal ballots, and running those ballots through vote counting machines multiple times. In making these false accusations, Defendants apparently drew their inspiration from lawyers for the Trump campaign, who contended on December 3, 2021, that video from a grainy security camera showed unidentified persons counting illegal ballots. Defendants took these unsupported factual assertions and almost immediately published them to millions of readers, subsequently attributing names and additional accusations of criminal fraud against Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss.
5. Within 24 hours, the claims had been publicly and definitively refuted by Georgia elections officials through a detailed explanation of what the misinterpreted video actually showed: no suitcases; no illegal ballots; no voter fraud. Defendants nonetheless repeated and republished the completely fictitious account, month after month, long after it was conclusively shown to be untrue. With no concern for the truth or the consequences of their willful conduct, Defendants baselessly portrayed Plaintiffs as traitors who participated in a carefully planned conspiracy to steal the presidential election in Georgia.
6. Defendants’ reports were both false and consequential. They caused Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss to be vilified on social media and subjected to an onslaught of violent, racist threats and harassment of all kinds. At the height of Defendants’ campaign of disinformation, Ms. Freeman, at the recommendation of the FBI, fled her home and did not return for two months. On January 6, 2021, a crowd on foot and in vehicles surrounded Ms. Freeman’s house. Ms. Freeman was forced to shutter her online business when social media became impossible to navigate. Ms. Moss has suffered personal and professional consequences in her ongoing work on Fulton County elections. On at least two occasions, strangers showed up at her grandmother’s home and attempted to push into the house in order to make a “citizens’ arrest.” Fulton County elections’ general email address would forward incoming emails to Ms. Moss and many of her colleagues, filling her workplace with harassing messages.
7. As a result of Defendants’ ongoing campaign, both women are afraid to live normal lives. Ms. Freeman is fearful when she hears her name called in public; Ms. Moss now fears risking even a visit to the grocery store and must get her groceries delivered instead. Defendants have inflicted and continue to inflict severe and ongoing emotional, and economic damage on both plaintiffs.
8. Plaintiffs file this lawsuit to vindicate their reputations and to ensure that other patriotic Americans who step forward to help make our election system function do not likewise become victims of abuse.
PARTIES
9. Plaintiff Ruby Freeman is a natural person and citizen of Georgia. Ms. Freeman worked as a temporary election worker with the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department during the 2020 general election. Her responsibilities as a temporary election worker included verifying signatures as absentee ballots came in, and then preparing absentee ballots for counting and processing.
10. Plaintiff Wandrea “Shaye” Moss is a natural person and citizen of Georgia. Ms. Moss has worked for the Fulton County Registration and Elections Department since 2012. Ms. Moss’s current position with the County is a Registration Officer, and her responsibilities include processing voter applications and assisting voters in person and over the phone. During the 2020 general election, she supervised Fulton County’s absentee ballot operation.
11. Defendant James “Jim” Hoft is a natural person and citizen of Missouri whose principal place of residence is in St. Louis City, Missouri. Jim Hoft is the owner and the sole organizer of TGP Communications LLC. He is the editor of and frequent contributor to a political website and blog called The Gateway Pundit that he created in 2004.
12. Defendant Joseph “Joe” Hoft is a natural person and citizen of Missouri, where he hosts a daily radio show from a studio in Chesterfield, Missouri. He also maintains a residence in Jensen Beach, Florida. He is Jim Hoft’s twin brother. Joe Hoft writes regularly for The Gateway Pundit.
13. Defendant TGP Communications LLC d/b/a The Gateway Pundit (“The Gateway Pundit”) is a limited liability company organized and existing under the laws of Missouri. At all times, The Gateway Pundit was acting by or through its authorized agent(s), employee(s), representative(s) or owner(s). Upon information and belief, The Gateway Pundit publishes its articles and related social media posts from James Hoft’s principal place of residence in St. Louis City, Missouri.
14. The Gateway Pundit has no registered agent. Gregory J. Hickel, the only agent the Gateway Pundit had registered with the Missouri Secretary of State, passed away in 2016, and The Gateway Pundit has not registered another agent.
JURISDICTION AND VENUE
15. The Courts of the State of Missouri have personal jurisdiction over all Defendants because all Defendants have published defamatory statements in Missouri, and taken other actions in Missouri, such statements and actions being the subject of this Petition, and accordingly this suit arises out of and relates to Defendants’ contacts with Missouri.
16. This Court may exercise personal jurisdiction over Jim Hoft as he is a resident and domiciliary of Missouri and he committed tortious actions giving rise to this cause of action within Missouri.
17. This Court may exercise personal jurisdiction over Joe Hoft as he is a resident and domiciliary of Missouri, writes for and maintains business contacts with The Gateway Pundit, and, on information and belief, visited Missouri and/or had contacts with this State in connection with the conduct giving rise to this action.
18. This Court may exercise personal jurisdiction over The Gateway Pundit as it is formed within and exists under the laws of Missouri, and it committed tortious actions giving rise to this cause of action within Missouri.
19. Venue is proper in St. Louis City, Missouri, because, pursuant to §508.010 R.S. Mo., in this action for defamation, the plaintiffs were first injured in St. Louis City, the jurisdiction in which the defamation was first published. Additionally, individual defendant Jim Hoft’s principal place of residence is St. Louis City, Missouri.
FACTS
A. The Role, Reach and Reputation of The Gateway Pundit
20. The Gateway Pundit reaches a large audience. A study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University of mainstream and social media coverage during the 2016 presidential race showed that the website was one of the most popular media sources on the right. Between May 1, 2015, and November 7, 2016, the website was the fifthmost popular source on Twitter and the third-most popular source on Facebook (notably, Fox News was the fourth most popular source on Facebook for the same period).4
21. The reach of The Gateway Pundit grew further in the 2020 election cycle. Research by the German Marshall Fund, a non-partisan policy organization, found the site to have been “particularly dominant” during the election, with a ninefold increase in the sharing of its content on Twitter between the fourth quarter of 2018 and the fourth quarter of 2020.5 The report also noted that nine of the website’s ten most popular articles in the fourth quarter of 2020 presented disinformation about voter fraud.
22. In September 2021, The Gateway Pundit had more than 2.8 million unique visitors, making it the eleventh-most-visited U.S. conservative site, according to one assessment.6 More than 650,000 users “like” its Facebook page, while 630,000 users “follow” the page.7 Roughly 98,000 people subscribe to its YouTube channel, and its videos regularly garner thousands of views.8
23. According to published reports, The Gateway Pundit earned as much as $1.1 million in Google Ad revenue between November 2020 and June 2021.9 In February 2021, The Gateway Pundit began offering a subscription service.10
24. Despite its professed allegiance to the truth, The Gateway Pundit regularly publishes false claims. The Berkman Klein Center study identified seven online sources—both left- and right-leaning—that were highly influential on social media, highly partisan, and sometimes explicitly deceptive. Among these, the study stated, “Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for ‘publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.’”11
25. Defendant Jim Hoft has responded derisively to the notion that The Gateway Pundit should verify information before publishing it. After a New Yorker reporter interviewing him in 2017 told Hoft to expect a call from the magazine’s fact-checkers, he responded: “Oh yeah, just like at the Gateway Pundit. We’ve got a huge department of full-time fact-checkers.” He then “laughed so hard that he nearly spilled his lemonade.”12
B. The 2020 Election in Fulton County, Georgia
26. In the fall of 2020, Americans cast ballots in the nation’s 59th presidential election, which pitted the incumbent, Republican Donald J. Trump, against the former Vice President, Democrat Joseph R. Biden. News coverage in the lead-up to Election Day noted that Georgia had “emerged as one of the nation’s biggest electoral battlegrounds in the race for the White House.”13
27. The voting process in Georgia began on September 15, 2020, when local officials began mailing out absentee ballots. Voters could cast early voting ballots in-person from October 12, 2020 until October 30, 2020, and they could vote by mail until Election Day, on November 3, 2020. All told, more than 4 million Georgians cast ballots during early voting or via absentee ballot in the 2020 election.14 On Election Day, when another 975,540 people cast votes,15 Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger observed, “We are having a successful election in Georgia today.”16
28. In Fulton County, absentee ballots were counted in State Farm Arena. Plaintiffs were employed to assist in the vote tabulation process at the arena.
29. On November 3, 2020, an overflowing urinal at State Farm Arena led to a brief voluntary evacuation of the affected area.17 According to a press release at the time:
At approximately 6:07 a.m., the staff at State Farm Arena notified Fulton County Registration & Elections of a water leak affecting the room where absentee ballots were being tabulated. The State Farm Arena team acted swiftly to remediate the issue. Within 2 hours, repairs were complete. No ballots were damaged, nor was any equipment affected. There was a brief delay in tabulating absentee ballots while the repairs were being conducted.18
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on November 3 that a pipe break had caused a water leak at the ballot processing site and specifically noted that no ballots were damaged.19 It was later determined that the water leak had been caused by an overflowing urinal.20
30. On November 13, 2020, NBC and CNN declared Biden the projected winner of Georgia.21
31. From November 11 through November 19, 2020, county election officials carried out a risk-limiting audit, which included a full manual tally of all votes cast and confirmed Biden had won Georgia’s election.22 “Audit boards from all 159 Georgia countries examined 41[,]881 batches, hand-sorting and counting each ballot as part of the process, which was the largest hand count of ballots in United States history.” According to the audit, “no individual county showed a variation in margin larger than 0.73%.” Moreover, “103 of the 159 counties showed a margin variation of less than 0.05%.”23 It concluded that “the correct winner was reported.”24
32. On November 20, 2020, Secretary of State Raffensperger certified Biden’s victory. That same day, Republican governor Brian Kemp certified Georgia’s election results.25
33. President Trump requested a recount, which was conducted using scanners that read and tally the votes.26 The recount was the third tally of votes in the Georgia presidential race and the third tally to conclude that Joe Biden won the election. On December 7, 2020, Georgia officials recertified Biden’s victory of the state’s 16 electoral votes.27
C. Trump’s Legal Team Initiates the Lie That Georgia Election Workers Illegally Instructed Observers to Leave and Counted Thousands of Fraudulent Ballots Unobserved
34. On December 3, 2020, Donald Trump’s legal team testified before the Georgia State Senate, alleging that fraud and misconduct had occurred during Georgia’s November 2020 election.28
35. In an attempt to demonstrate that there had been irregularities in ballot-counting, a lawyer for the Trump campaign named Jacki Pick played cherry-picked snippets of surveillance video of the absentee and military vote count at the State Farm Arena.29 While the surveillance video of the vote counting on November 3 is 14 hours long, Ms. Pick played only a few brief excerpts during her 17-minute testimony.
36. While playing the video excerpts for the State Senate, Ms. Pick provided her own interpretation of what was being shown. She claimed that Republican observers had been asked to leave the arena in contravention of Georgia law and that, once they were gone, the election workers produced and counted 18,000 hidden, fraudulent ballots—more than the margin of victory in the presidential race.30
37. Ms. Pick described the surveillance videotape as showing Republican observers and the press leaving the room shortly before 11 p.m. after a “lady who has blonde braids” asked them to leave and told them that election workers were going to stop counting ballots for the day. The surveillance video had no sound to corroborate this claim, but Ms. Pick said she had been provided this information by the observers and noted that the video showed four election workers staying while observers and press departed. She identified the election workers in the room as “the lady in purple,” “two women in yellow,” and “the lady with the blonde braids also, who told everyone to leave.”31
38. Ms. Pick’s commentary continued as she played her video excerpt: “Once everyone is gone, coast is clear, they are going to pull ballots out from underneath a table.” Ms. Pick said it was not typical to store “suitcases” full of ballots under a table and pointed out a table which she claimed had been placed there earlier in the day by “the lady with the blonde braids.” Ms. Pick did not identify the four election workers by name but said “one of them had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere.”32
39. Ms. Pick acknowledged that the Trump legal team had taken only a couple of hours to review the 14 hours of surveillance footage, and no one working for the campaign had watched the entire video, even once.33
40. Both the Georgia Secretary of State and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation immediately investigated Ms. Pick’s claims. The Secretary of State is a Republican who had been endorsed during his campaign by Donald Trump. They reviewed the security videotape, interviewed all witnesses who were present at the time of the alleged misconduct, and found no evidence whatsoever to substantiate any of Ms. Pick’s claims.34
41. Secure the Vote, a website maintained by the office of the Secretary of State, provides a detailed fact check of Ms. Pick’s claims about what is depicted in the video.35 Secure the Vote’s timeline documents the events from November 3, 2020, actually shown on the video, including:
5:22 a.m. Workers arrive at the State Farm Arena and discover a water leak. They immediately move tables and ballots away from the leak to prevent any water damage.
6:30 a.m. Workers can be seen moving tables, but not tampering with ballots.
7:11 a.m. Workers are seen vacuuming and drying the floors.
8:22 a.m. Workers begin rearranging the room to its original layout. They move tables and ballot containers. The table under which a “suitcase” full of ballots was allegedly stashed is moved, revealing nothing hidden there.
9:57 p.m. Poll workers prepare to stop work for the night and empty ballot containers are brought into the room. Workers then fill the containers with uncounted ballots.
10:06 p.m. Poll workers store the containers with uncounted ballots under the table for the night while there are still many people in the room.
11:02 p.m. After the Secretary of State36 told poll workers they should continue working through the night, they remove the containers with uncounted ballots from underneath the table and resume their counting.
D. Defendants Publish and Republish the Lie
42. Immediately after Ms. Pick spoke in the Georgia Senate on December 3, 2020, the false accusation of wrongdoing and misleading excerpts from the surveillance video were circulated widely by the Trump campaign and various media outlets. For example, One America News Network rebroadcast the surveillance video shown earlier that day by the Trump lawyers with Ms. Pick’s commentary.37
43. The Trump campaign promptly amplified and republished a brief excerpt from the One America News Network’s coverage38 and distributed it repeatedly on Twitter that same day.39 The excerpt depicted four individuals walking between desks while one individual removes containers from underneath a table in the foreground and brings them back to the desks. The individuals then remove ballots from the containers and process them.40 (This edited footage from the surveillance video will hereafter be called the “Trump Edited Video.”)
44. That same day, December 3, 2020, The Gateway Pundit published its first article disseminating the same Trump Edited Video. The story was promoted under the headline “HUGE! Video Footage From Georgia Shows Suitcases Filled with Ballots Pulled From Under Table AFTER Supervisor Told GOP Poll Workers to Leave Tabulation Center.” Written by Cristina Laila, the article republished two Team Trump tweets about the video and added the following claims:
Poll watchers were kicked out of the State Farm Arena tabulation center on election night after a burst pipe caused flooding.
…
We now know that a pipe never burst. It was all a lie in order to kick out poll watchers while a few crooks stayed behind to count illegal ballots for Joe Biden.
Trump’s legal team showed a video from the State Farm Arena tabulation center when poll workers were told to leave at 10:25 PM.
A few “workers” stayed behind and were seen pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables to be tabulated!41
45. The article concludes with a photo captioned, “Close up photo of the suitcases being wheeled out from under tables.”42
46. Defendant Jim Hoft amplified this story and its defamatory claims using his Twitter account.43
47. A little while later, Hoft again amplified the story and added additional defamatory remarks, calling Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss “dirty Crooks” and insinuating that they were political operatives:44
Jim Hoft @gatewaypundit Dec 3
Thanks @TheDemocrats for turning America into a Banana Republic! Yeah, F**k You for Doing this to US.
SUITCASES OF FRAUDULENT BALLOTS!
Nice work you dirty Crooks!!
48. In the afternoon on December 3, The Gateway Pundit published another article, titled, “WHERE’S BILL BARR? — We Got Your Voter Fraud AG Barr — It’s On Video and They Attempted to Steal Georgia with It! — HOW ABOUT A FEW ARRESTS?”45 It accused those in the video of “stay[ing] behind to count illegal ballots for Joe Biden” and “cheating”:
We now know that a pipe never burst. It was all a lie in order to kick out poll watchers while a few crooks stayed behind to count illegal ballots for Joe Biden.
Trump’s legal team showed a video from the State Farm Arena tabulation center when poll workers were told to leave at 10:25 PM.
A few “workers” stayed behind and were seen pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables to be tabulated!
They were caught cheating!
49. Later on December 3, The Gateway Pundit published another article repeating the false report, headlined “What’s Up, Ruby?… BREAKING: Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.” Written by Defendant Jim Hoft, this article reasserted the false claims about “crooked Democrats” engaging in “voter fraud.”46
50. This article was the first to identify by name Plaintiff Ruby Freeman as one of the workers in the video, naming Ms. Freeman and her business and falsely accusing her of voter fraud. It stated:
One woman in the video is wearing a purple top.
…
Her name is Ruby Freeman.
And she made the mistake of advertising her purse on her desk the same night she was involved in voter fraud on a MASSIVE SCALE.
Her T-shirt says “Lady Ruby” and her purse says, “LaRuby” which is her company.
This was not a very smart move.
Her company is called “LaRuby’s Unique Treasures.”
It’s on her LinkedIn page!
…
Maybe the Georgia police or Bill Barr’s DOJ may want to pay Ruby Freeman a visit.47
51. The article concluded with the following images of Ms. Freeman, over a banner saying “CROOK GETS CAUGHT.”
CROOK GETS CAUGHT
52. Defendants Jim and Joe Hoft amplified this story on Twitter, too.48
E. Despite Prompt and Authoritative Refutation of the False Report by Multiple Sources, Defendants Republish and Magnify the Lies for Months
53. The Trump legal team’s claim of voter fraud in the State Farm Arena was flatly, fully, and publicly repudiated by Georgia election officials within 24 hours after it was made. At 6:41 a.m. on December 4, 2020, the Voting Implementation Manager for the State of Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, shot down the fanciful claim on Twitter: “The 90 second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by @GaSecofState investigators. Shows normal ballot processing. Here is the fact check on it.”49
54. Mr. Sterling’s tweet shared a link to a fact check published by Lead Stories, a fact-checking website that identifies false or misleading stories. It demonstrated that the Trump Edited Video did not show suitcases full of ballots being pulled from under a table, and that poll watchers were not told to leave.50 The fact check quotes Georgia election officials explaining that the containers in the video contained ballots that were processed for counting earlier in the night, that the vote count data and voter verifications negated the claim that thousands of fraudulent ballots had been introduced into the count, and that it was not illegal for election workers to count ballots in the observers’ absence.51
55. Several days earlier, after reports of harassment and death threats against election officials, Mr. Sterling had made clear what he believed were the likely consequences of the continued attacks on Georgia’s election system. “Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed,” he had stated in a news conference.52
56. Nonetheless, Jim Hoft authored another article published on The Gateway Pundit later that morning under the title “BREAKING: CROOKED GEORGIA ELECTIONS SUPERVISER [sic] Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots from Beneath Table IS IDENTIFIED — IT’S RUBY’S DAUGHTER! (Video).” The article repeated the now-debunked allegations from the night before and introduced new false claims:
Earlier on Thursday Cristina Laila reported on the explosive video that was revealed during the Georgia ballot counting at the State Farm Arena where crooked Democrats pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.
Trump’s legal team showed a video from the State Farm Arena tabulation center when poll workers were told to leave at 10:25 PM.
A few “workers” stayed behind and were seen pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables to be tabulated!
…
We identified one of the operatives last night who was caught on video counting illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!
As you can see from the video one woman in a purple top was filmed helping pull out the ballots and then sitting down to count the ballots.
That woman has now been identified.
Local 11 News covered the story from the State Farm Arena that a pipe had burst.
(This later was proven to be complete fraud and an excuse to kick out the GOP election observers!)
…
Her name is Ruby Freeman.
And she made the mistake of advertising her purse on her desk the same night she was involved in voter fraud on a MASSIVE SCALE.
…
Ruby’s purse was a hit and several fans wrote her on her LinkedIn page after they saw her and her purse on TV.
They then commented on her LinkedIn page.
Ruby Freeman still has an active Facebook page (as of 11 PM on Thursday night).
On her page Ruby Freeman brags about her “Shaye” being her supervisor.
It is clear from a video that was released that Shaye and Ruby are very close.
Here are a few entries from Ruby’s Facebook page.
…
Ruby made a post on Facebook on Nov 3, “Look at my Baby giving that look to the employees. Mommie is so proud of you. Supervisor of registration.”
And here is a closeup of the woman in question via a Getty image.
Her official name is “Wandrea Moss.”
…
You can clearly see “Shaye” the woman in blonde pigtails removing suitcases of ballots from under a table after GOP observers were evacuated from the room and told to go home.53
57. The same morning, Georgia Public Broadcasting published its own article factchecking the election fraud claims made during the George State Senate hearing on the previous day. The article directly refuted the Trump legal team’s claims concerning the contents of the Trump Edited Video. It reported that the video showed a normal tabulation process, which both state and county officials had verified. It also reported that no observers had been asked to leave, but Republican monitors and the press did leave when some election employees stopped their work for the night. And it clarified that Georgia law does not require poll monitors to be present for the ballot counting process.54
58. Defendants learned of the ongoing fact checks almost immediately after they were published.
59. Less than two hours after Voting Implementation Manager Sterling tweeted that what the video of Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss showed was “normal ballot processing,” Defendant Joe Hoft published an article titled, “CLOWN SHOW: Georgia Election Insider Gabriel Sterling Freaks Out and Labels Election Fraud Caught on Camera ‘Normal Ballot Processing.’” Rather than acknowledge the falsity of The Gateway Pundit’s earlier stories—or even neutrally reporting on the fact checks, that article lobbed a series of ad hominem attacks against Mr. Sterling and doubled down on Defendants’ false claims, including the statement:
Unfortunately for Sterling, we can’t even keep up with the amount of corruption in Georgia related to this year’s election. Yesterday for example, a video was unearthed by the Trump team showing Democrat counters in Atlanta pulling out suitcases full of ballots and counting them after sending Republicans home due to a falsely reported water main break (um, this is against the law Mr. Sterling). But Sterling still wants to call it all a lie. He claims there was no corruption in this year’s election and he shares another totally bogus ‘fact check’ from Lead Stories as in his Facebook page as support that this is all normal.55
60. Even after acknowledging the first fact check, and after the second fact check was published and available online, Jim Hoft published another article on The Gateway Pundit on December 4, 2020, repeating and realleging the false claims that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss secretly brought illicit ballots into the arena to be counted and had committed massive voter fraud. This article was titled “NEW VIDEO Shows Anti-Trump Georgia Ballot Counter Ruby Freeman with Piles of Ballots, Walking Past Boxes of Ballots, Working Alone in Cubes WITH NO GOP OBSERVERS IN SIGHT!” and made new false and defamatory claims about Ms. Freeman:
Now there is video of Ruby Freeman filming herself entering the building to count Georgia ballots.
Ruby walks by several boxes of ballots just sitting around in the room.
The elections workers were each given their own secret cube. Then Ruby goes to her desk and pulls out a tray of ballots on her desk.
There is NO supervisor or GOP observer anywhere in sight.
And then Ruby leaves the ballots on her desk as she goes to take a break.
This is suspicious activity. The State Farm Center was full of unsecured ballots and illegal conduct.56
61. Jim and Joe Hoft amplified this story using their Twitter accounts.57
62. Seeking to magnify the false claims and gain still more shares on social media, Jim Hoft published a third article on The Gateway Pundit on December 4, repeating the false and disproven claims from his earlier articles. This article was titled, “UPDATE: More on the Suitcase Vote Scam, the Elections Supervisor and that Strange ‘Pass’ Between Mother and Daughter That Was Also Caught on Video.” It discussed the relationship between Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss and introduced a new baseless allegation of still more illicit activity supposedly shown on the Trump Edited Video:
On her [Facebook] page Ruby Freeman brags about her “Shaye” being her supervisor.
…
And now there is video of Ruby secretly passing something to her daughter during the ballot counting.
It is not clear what was passed. Some readers say it was a USB stick but it is not clear what they passed to each other.
It sure looks like they were trying to hide this transaction.58
63. This article made clear Defendants’ ill-will toward Ms. Freeman in repeating the false claims against her over and over again. In it, Jim Hoft noted the consequences of The Gateway Pundit’s publicity on Ms. Freeman and implicitly urged readers to harass her:
Ruby’s purse was a hit and several fans wrote her on her LinkedIn page after they saw her and her purse on TV.
They then commented on her LinkedIn page.
Note: Please do not confuse this with a similar business in Snellville!
Ruby Freeman had an active Facebook page last night.
It was shut down early on Friday morning.59
64. Jim Hoft amplified this story on social media.60
65. At approximately 10:08 a.m. ET, Voting Implementation Manager Gabe Sterling joined Newsmax for a roughly 17-minute segment.61 After playing a clip of the Trump Campaign’s footage and soliciting comments from another guest, the host asked Sterling to weigh in on the video. Sterling straightforwardly debunked any claim that the video showed anything nefarious:
Unlike watching 90 seconds of it like we saw in the Senate hearing yesterday, we’ve had our investigators watch all many several hours of it yesterday. And what essentially happened is—and we knew about this, part of this, on election night itself—around 10:15/10:20, there’s two groups of people in this room that are working. There are cutters—the people who are opening the envelopes—and then there’s the people who are scanning, which is the ones we see on the video.
And let’s keep a few things in mind. I’ve been in this room. It’s really obvious there’s video cameras everywhere, so they know they’re being watched on that front.
So what happened was, when the cutters were—they were, once they were done, they were, they was like, “Okay, we’re done, time to go home,” and the media started packing up. And then the monitors kept packing up.
Now the one thing we have is that he said she said, where the officials there said, “we didn’t tell anybody that they had to leave.” The people who left—the Republican monitor said, “we were told we had to leave.” And we have no audio from those videotapes to ascertain the absolute truth. That’s what is he said she said on that front.
But when you watch the video, the process—those aren’t suitcases. Those are regular absentee carriers used in dozens of counties across the state. That’s how they bring those in. Nothing was brought in without the monitors there, so everything was there. There was nothing new brought in. We didn’t see somebody wheeling stuff into the room; we saw stuff that was already in the room that the monitors already saw brought in.
And then you saw the processes they’re doing. Essentially what happened, the elections director called the absentee coordinator that’s saying we’re not shutting down. Tell them they gotta go get back to work because the counting people thought they were also getting to go home. So they were kind of disappointed. So you see him on his phone. He walks over to them, they kind of shrug their shoulders like, “crap, we got to go back to work again.” So, so they started doing that, and then we found out that the monitors weren’t there anymore. So, we called their elections directors, and we called our state elections board monitor, who we have placed in Fulton County under a consent decree that we had ordered because of their screw-ups in the June election, and yes, there was 82 minutes where there wasn’t a person there. But we have all the videotape that we are literally looking at right now.
We have to ask ourselves in that period of time, I think it was about three to five thousand votes that were scanned, and did this elections crew of, you know, medium-paid, tired elections workers suddenly become the Ocean’s Eleven crew as part of a theft of an election? Or is it more likely they were tired and irritated?
You see when the SEB monitor gets there, and when the investigator gets there, the armed investigator, they keep doing the exact same thing they were doing. They don’t even pay any mind because it’s just—they’re doing their regular processes.
And the problem we have is people don’t understand this, and when people whip people’s emotions up, it goes back to the issue I was talking about before of threats being against these thousands of workers across the country.
66. On information and belief, Jim Hoft watched this segment, as he immediately criticized Newsmax for airing the segment and reiterated his false claims:62
Jim Hoft
@gatewaypundit
VERY DISAPPOINTING to Go on @Newsmax and Allow @GabrielSterling to LASH OUT AT REPUBLICANS after EXPLOSIVE SUITCASE FRAUD EXPOSED! That Segment was a TRAINWRECK! @Newsmax better get their sh*t together. This was an OUTRAGEOUS Segment!
7:26 AM Dec 4, 2020
67. Not satisfied with the harm done, Defendants published another article about Ms. Freeman on The Gateway Pundit later on December 4. Written by Joe Hoft, this article summarized the false and already debunked claims in the three previous articles by Jim Hoft, and it advanced the new false and defamatory smear that Ms. Freeman supposedly counted the same votes for Biden three times. Titled “UNBELIEVABLE: Anti-Trump Democrat In Georgia ‘Suitcase Scandal’ Caught Running Same Batch of Ballots Through Tabulator THREE TIMES! (VIDEO),” the article stated:
The mother – daughter team of ballot counters in Atlanta really overdid their fraud. We saw last night how they stuck around and counted ballots after kicking Republicans out of the State Farm Center on a fake water main break hoax.
We also saw the mother and daughter pass an object the size of a thumb drive between each other in a suspicious manner[.]
Now we have evidence mother Ruby sent the same stack of votes through a tabulator in the State Farm Center three times. This is illegal.
The corrupt Republican politicians in Georgia are giving the election to Joe Biden. Besides them, nobody did more to steal the election for Joe Biden than this mother – daughter combo. The good people in Georgia need to stand up.63
68. Defendants later boasted that they originated the false and defamatory claim that Ms. Freeman tabulated the same votes three times.64
69. On December 4, PolitiFact—a non-profit website that checks the accuracy of claims made by elected officials and others—published another fact check of the claim repeatedly made by The Gateway Pundit that video footage from Georgia showed suitcases filled with ballots being illegally counted after election monitors were told to leave. The PolitiFact article confirmed the conclusions of Lead Stories and Georgia Public Broadcasting that the claim was plainly false. It featured a statement from Richard Barron, the elections director in Fulton County, who confirmed that no announcement was made telling people to leave. Rather, certain staff members left as their work was finished. Mr. Barron himself told the workers scanning the ballots to keep working. Mr. Barron also confirmed that it was normal to keep containers under the tables near the scanners.65
70. Two days later, on December 6, 2020, after the Defendants’ statements had been thoroughly refuted by multiple state and county officials, Defendants published two more articles in The Gateway Pundit. The articles purported to disclose “exclusive” new information about the “man in red” shown in the security video, and each repeated the false claims that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss were involved in “voter corruption”:
]quote] [I]t was uncovered that a mother and daughter team, Ruby Freeman and her daughter “Shaye” Moss as well as a couple others, stuck around after sending everyone home and started running ballots through tabulators. Ballots were pulled out from under a table that were previously covered up and processed with no Republican observers.
The mother - daughter team have become infamous in the annals of voter corruption[.]66[/quote]
71. Jim Hoft amplified this story on Twitter.67
72. Also on December 6, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp filed in federal court a sworn affidavit from Frances Watson, chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State, further refuting these lies. Gov. Kemp filed this affidavit in Pearson v. Kemp, Civ. No. 1:20-cv- 04809-TCB (N.D. Ga), in response to claims by a group of Presidential Electors for Trump of widespread election-related misconduct. The affidavit detailed the results of an investigation by Ms. Watson into the alleged events at the State Farm Arena. Ms. Watson attested that her investigative team interviewed witnesses and reviewed the entire security footage. Her investigation found that (a) observers and members of the press were not told to leave, but exited the room after seeing a group of workers responsible for opening envelopes leave; and (b) no ballots were brought in from an unknown location and hidden under a table. She also stated that the video showed opened but uncounted ballots being placed in boxes and stored under the table, and later showed the boxes being opened so the workers could scan the ballots when the counting resumed later that night.68
73. The Watson affidavit’s submission and its content were widely reported in the press on December 6 and 7, 2020.69
74. Nonetheless, Jim Hoft published two more articles early on December 7 containing additional false and defamatory statements about Plaintiffs. The first labeled Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss “suspects in the suitcase ballot fraud at the State Farm Center” and said they were captured on the “most explosive video of the entire campaign season” pulling “hidden ballots in the suitcases” out and counting them “after all of the GOP observers and media was sent home for a ‘water main’ break.” It then mocked Ms. Freeman for supposedly saying she “needed a lawyer” and declining an interview request by “Carolyn Ryan TV.”70
75. Jim Hoft amplified this article on Twitter.71
76. In a second article on December 7, 2020, Jim Hoft blasted out the “HUGE” news that the third “suspect” in the “suitcase scandal” was the same man who told reporters there had been a “water main break.” The article depicted the claim of a water problem as clever ruse to facilitate election fraud by plaintiffs:
We know this was a lie because there was NEVER a work order filed and the water department never received a call.
It never happened!
But it gave Ralph and Ruby and Shaye cover to complete their scam on Georgia and America!72
77. Jim Hoft amplified this story on Twitter.73
78. In a news conference on December 7, Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s Voting Implementation Manager, once more refuted the lies about the Trump Edited Video that The Gateway Pundit was continuing to spread. He yet again confirmed that the surveillance video showed that the containers taken from under a table held valid, uncounted ballots that had been stored by workers who thought they were leaving for the night. After realizing that they were staying, the workers unpacked the ballots from the containers and resumed scanning them. Mr. Sterling specifically refuted the claim that election workers had scanned the same ballots multiple times, explaining that any such action would have been revealed by the hand count undertaken by Georgia election officials and machine-based recount requested by the Trump campaign. Neither recount showed a meaningful change in results originally reported.74
79. In the evening on December 7, Jim Hoft further evidenced Defendants’ awareness of the fact checks, sharing a link to an article in The Federalist discussing the various factchecks:
Jim Hoft @gatewaypundit 5h
Excellent! The Georgia Vote-Counting Video Was Not "Debunked.' Not Even Close
The Georgia Vote-Counting Video Was Not 'Debunked.' Not even Close. A "fact" 'checking' outfit claimed to debunk explosive evidence for Republicans' claims of significant election problems in Georgia. It ... thefederalist.com
80. Nonetheless, with full awareness that his statements about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had been flatly and fully refuted by multiple officials and multiple fact-checking organizations, Jim Hoft continued to publish false statements on The Gateway Pundit.
81. On December 8, 2020, Jim Hoft published three new articles repeating and doubling down on the false and defamatory claims. The first article was titled “CONFIRMED: Supervisor Shaye Moss - Who “Yelled Out” for Georgia GOP Observers to GO Home - Is Same Woman Who Pulled the Suitcase Ballots Out from Underneath the Table When they Left.” In addition to repeating previously made false claims about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, it stated:
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist reported earlier today that poll watchers in sworn affidavits claim it was “a woman with blonde braids” who appeared to be a supervisor “yelled out” to those present in the room that they would stop working for the night and would resume in the morning.
Shaye told everyone to go home.
Then Shaye, her mother and a couple others including Ralph Jones, Sr. were filmed taking “suitcases” of ballots hidden under a table out to be tabulated. This was right before Joe Biden got his surprise spike in ballots.
And now the liberal media and their fake “fact-checkers” are lying about the incredible incident caught on video!76
82. Jim Hoft’s second article on December 8 was titled, “NOW WITH AUDIO: Georgia Election Official Ralph Jones, Sr. Announced on Nov. 3rd Evening that Counting would Stop at 11 PM — Then Led Team to Count Stashed ‘Suitcase” Ballots.” This article noted both the Pearson v. Kemp affidavit, which stated that the count was never intended to stop at 10:00 p.m., and Mr. Sterling’s statement that counting was resumed at 11:00 p.m. It stated:
Ralph led a team of operatives in carrying out a massive voter fraud scandal on election night at the State Farm Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
Ralph and his team plotted to remove ALL elections observers (Republicans) from the counting room so they could roll out their suitcases full of Joe Biden ballots and run them through the machine.
…
For the record — Georgia anti-Trump elections official Gabe Sterling later said that the local officials called for the counting to resume at 11 PM but this is just not true.
…
The elections officials used the “water main break” to say there was a delay in counting and they used that to send people home — except for the suitcase gang.
Then Ralph Jones, Sr., Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Ross went to work rolling out the hidden suitcases of ballots stashed under the table and hidden from view.
It was their actions that gave Joe Biden the spike in unexplained votes in Georgia on Wednesday morning.
It appears that this was a conspiracy to remove observers from the center and then to commit their hidden suitcase ballot fraud.
…
The lying fake news media wants you to believe this entire incident was debunked.
Nothing could be further from the truth — something that is lacking in the mainstream media and their “fact-checkers” today.
We now have actual audio of Ralph Jones — the elections official at the heart of the “suitcase scandal” telling government officials the State Farm Center will shut down at 10 or 11 PM on Election night!
Georgia Secretary of State officials released an affidavit insisting there never was an intent to stop the count at 10:00 PM, but only the cutters were going to stop.77
83. Jim Hoft authored a third article that same day to discredit the fact check organization Lead Stories, one of the several outside groups that had found the “suitcase scandal” to be no scandal at all. He sought to undermine their credibility by writing: “Lead Stories we now know is funded by Facebook and a Chinese company. So it makes sense that they would target any conservative outlet that reported on this explosive video.”78 He used the occasion to repeat yet again the false claim that plaintiffs had “stayed behind and were seen pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables to be tabulated after the GOP inspectors and media left the room,” in a pre-planned conspiracy to commit election fraud.
84. Jim Hoft amplified each of these stories on Twitter.79
85. Defendants’ false and defamatory tirade targeting Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss continued later that same month. On December 23, 2020, Jim Hoft published an article repeating a tweet posted by Team Trump the day before. This article was titled “Has the FBI Spoken with Ruby Freeman or Ralph Jones Yet? And If Not, Why in the Hell Do we Have an FBI?” It repeated prior false and defamatory claims about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss published on The Gateway Pundit, boasting of the publication’s leading role in spreading the misinformation:
On Tuesday night President Trump tweeted out an OANN report on a Gateway Pundit investigation of the Atlanta suitcase voter fraud scandal.
The Gateway Pundit was first to identify Ruby Freeman, her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, and their boss Ralph Jones, Sr. in the infamous suitcase ballot hoist [sic].
We later reported on Ruby Freeman running the same batch of ballots through the counting machines at least three times after these Democrat operatives cleared the room of observers!
On Tuesday night President Trump tweeted this OANN and Gateway Pundit video.Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Team Trump (Text TRUMPT to 88022)
ELECTIONS FRAUD
POLL WORKER IN FULTON COUNTY, GA, CAUGHT ON CAMERA SCANNING SAME STACK OF BALLOTS MULTIPLE TIMES.
5:08 pm 22 Dec 2020
Shaye Moss is the same person who called out for observers to go home late on election night before the ballot hoist.
Ralph Jones, Sr. is ON AUDIO telling reporters he was going to shut down the State Farm Center early and send observers home. This was BEFORE the suitcase ballot hoist [sic]!
It was a carefully planned event!
They had NO IDEA they would get caught!
At this time there is no evidence that FBI or the Georgia Bureau of Investigations have interviewed or arrested Ruby Freeman, Shaye Ross, or Ralph Jones, Sr.
They were able to flip Georgia for Beijing Biden by their actions.
Why is the FBI or DOJ not involved?
This tells you everything you need to know about your federal government.80
86. Jim Hoft amplified this story on Twitter.81
87. On January 2, 2021, Donald Trump placed a telephone call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to change the outcome of the Georgia presidential election by finding more votes for him. To justify his request, Mr. Trump repeated some of the many false allegations about Ms. Freeman that Defendants had been publishing throughout December. These include statements calling her “a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler,” and asserting, “we’re so far ahead of these numbers, even the phony ballots of Ruby Freeman — known scammer.”82
88. The next day, Jim Hoft published an article on The Gateway Pundit about this phone call. The article’s headline announced, “HUGE: TRUMP DROPS A BOMB DURING PHONE CALL! Tells Raffensperger ‘Vote Scammer and Hustler’ Ruby Freeman Was Behind Alleged 18,000 FRAUDULENT VOTES in Suitcase Scandal! (VIDEO).” The article republished the portion of the call’s transcript when Mr. Trump made the accusation of election fraud that defendants had been publishing repeatedly since December 3, and it inserted Ms. Freeman’s name where it had been omitted by The Washington Post, which had broken the story about the call. It stated:
President Trump: We have at least 18,000, that’s on tape. We had them counted very painstakingly. 18,000 voters having to [sic] with BEEP [in red] (Ruby Freeman). She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler. BEEP [in red] (Ruby Freeman) that is the tape that is shown all over the world. It makes everybody look bad, you, me and everybody else. Number one, they said very clearly, and it’s been reported that they said that there’s a water main break. Everybody fled the area. And then they came back. BEEP [in red] (Ruby Freeman) and her daughter and a few people.83
89. The article then reminded readers of The Gateway Pundit that it “was first to identify Ruby Freeman, her daughter Shaye Moss and supervisor Ralph Jones, Sr. in the suitcase fraud scandal that was caught on tape and went viral online.”84
90. Jim Hoft amplified this story on Twitter.85
91. On January 4, 2021, Georgia election officials held yet another press conference to refute the already-debunked election fraud allegations that Mr. Trump had raised in his call with Mr. Raffensperger.86 Gabriel Sterling once again described the events that occurred on election day at State Farm Arena, explained how they represented entirely normal ballot processing, and directed listeners to the Georgia’s Secretary of State’s website for a detailed timeline matched to the surveillance footage.87 Sterling reiterated for the assembled reporters the actual series of events:
Late in the evening, after the water main break had been fixed, election workers prepared to go home for the night and followed standard procedures to store ballots securely: placing them in containers and affixing numbered seals. But when Mr. Raffensperger found out that they were closing up shop, he ordered them to continue counting through the night — so the workers retrieved the containers and resumed counting ballots.88
Sterling expressed his great frustration that the Trump legal team “had the entire tape” revealing these facts, and nevertheless “intentionally misled the State Senate, the voters and the people of the United States about this.”89
92. Defendants were well aware Georgia Secretary of State’s website and additional fact check, as evidenced by Jim Hoft’s tweet on January 4, 2021:90
Jim Hoft
@gatewaypundit
Here are the videos of the State Farm Center in Atlanta on Election Day into Election Night -- securevotega.com/factcheck/ - It appears the state officials made them purposely so they take forever to play. If anyone sees anything interesting please let us know.
3:40 PM Jan 4, 2021
93. PolitiFact published a fact-check article about the Raffensperger call that same day, finding that the events described by Mr. Sterling lined up with previous reports from PolitiFact and other fact-checkers. This article repeated PolitiFact’s earlier assessment that the arena surveillance video showed no wrongdoing and provided no evidence of election fraud. It rated Mr. Trump’s claim that Georgia election workers pulled 18,000 ballots from suitcases and counted them for Biden as “Pants on Fire!” false.91
F. The Gateway Pundit’s Continuing Publication of False and Defamatory Claims
94. Nonetheless, Jim Hoft continued to return to his false statements about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss long after Inauguration Day. In June 2021, prompted by an online report that batches of absentee ballots were missing in Fulton County, he published another article replete with baseless and disproven allegations of voter fraud by plaintiffs:
[quoteThis follows news first reported by The Gateway Pundit that election operative Ruby Freeman was also caught tripe [sic] counting stacks of votes late at night at the counting center after GOP observers were sent home.
…
On December 4th TGP reported with video on anti-Trump ballot counter Ruby Freeman working in a private cube with trays of ballots, walking past open boxes of ballots, working alone with NO ELECTION OBSERVERS IN SIGHT!
This is the DEFINITION OF CHEATING!
The video and tweet was removed from Twitter but we found the video on YouTube and we are saving a copy. [Embedded is a copy of an Instagram video taken by Ms. Freeman in October 2020 that she had removed.]
…
Now there is video of Ruby Freeman filming herself entering the building to count Georgia ballots.
Ruby walks by several boxes of ballots just sitting around in the room.
The elections workers were each given their own secret cube.
Then Ruby goes to her desk and pulls out a tray of ballots on her desk.
There is NO supervisor or GOP observer anywhere in sight.
And then Ruby leaves the ballots on her desk as she goes to take a break.
This is suspicious activity. The State Farm Center was full of unsecured ballots and illegal conduct.
The Democrat operatives were running a voter fraud factory inside the State Farm Center on Election Day and into Election Week!92[/quote]
95. On August 14, 2021, Joe Hoft published another article on The Gateway Pundit falsely describing how Ms. Freeman, Ms. Moss, and other election workers had been added to a lawsuit against Fulton County alleging election fraud.93 The article republished The Gateway Pundit’s prior defamatory statements about Ms. Freeman and boasted about its role in promulgating and amplifying the false claims:
We first discovered Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss in December when The Gateway Pundit first reported that these two election workers took ballots out from under a table on Election night and jammed thousands of ballots into the tabulators numerous times.
This was after all of the election observers were sent home for the night. This was also after Trump had accumulated what experts said was an insurmountable lead in the state.
We revealed first that the ballots taken out from under tables on Election night were pushed into tabulators up to three times each.
…
This is not good for Ruby and her daughter.
It’s also pathetic that these two are not in jail already. Their crimes were videotaped!94