Summary of Find Me the Votes by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election

By Justin Reese

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Find Me the Votes by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election

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• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
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Find Me the Votes is an epic inside story of the prosecution of a defeated president, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman. The book provides an authoritative and dramatic account of the Trump conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and how a local Georgia prosecutor, a daughter of the civil rights movement, decided to indict him and his allies for his desperate attempt to hold on to power. The authors reveal new information on the plot to criminally seize voting equipment, Sidney Powell's attempt to obtain preemptive pardons from Trump, and revelatory communications between the president and his co-conspirators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223978893

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman’s Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election designed to enrich your reading experience.

DISCLAIMER

The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.

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Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.

PROLOGUE

The Body Double

In mid-August 2023, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis was in the final stages of assembling a massive racketeering case against former President Donald Trump and eighteen other co-conspirators for allegedly attempting to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Trump had been riling up his supporters at rallies and on social media, calling Willis a radical, a Marxist, a racist, and even claiming she had an affair with a gang leader she had once represented as a defense lawyer. As the indictment of the former president approached, the volume and velocity of hateful messages aimed at Willis were increasing dramatically, and the threats themselves were taking a much darker turn—more graphic and specific.

As the digital message rang, the deep and gravelly, computerdisguised voice said, we know we know your address, we know your address, we're going to rape you, we're going to hang you, we're going to kill you, the caller continued, spitting out the word n***er for good measure. The caller then started talking about Willis's two daughters, causing Willis to be unnerved. However, the digital message only made her more determined to pursue the course she had chosen. The most appalling consequence of Trump's war in Georgia was the number of innocent people victimized by his reckless conspiracy-mongering.

Trump's post-election conduct in 2020 faced resistance from elected officeholders from his own party, particularly in Georgia. Raffensperger, the state's top election official, was the point person in standing up to Trump, rejecting demands from the president and his allies. Chris Carr, Georgia's Republican attorney general, vowed to resign before defending Trump's attempt to convene a special session of the state legislature to reverse the election results. Brian Kemp, the state's GOP governor, repeatedly incurred the president's wrath, refusing to join a Trump-backed appeal to the Supreme Court contesting the election results. In the end, Trump's efforts in Georgia failed due to an iron wall forged by the state's top Republican officeholders, their deputies, and their lawyers.

However, it was undoubtedly cosmic justice that a determined Black local DA, Fani Willis, brought Donald Trump to justice in Georgia. Willis, a uniquely American character rooted in a community whose spirit, history, and culture he knew nothing about, was a force of nature. On August 14, 2023, she announced her charges against Trump, charging nineteen individuals with violations of Georgia law arising from a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results.

BOOK ONE

The Making of a DA

Badass

Fani Willis, the newly elected district attorney of Fulton County, found her office in downtown Atlanta to be a mess. She found boxes of never-closed case files and personal protective equipment, which had been ordered by her predecessor, Paul Howard, but never opened due to the Covid pandemic. The office was also stripped of all its photographs except for one conspicuous one, a shot of Willis being handed a certification of promotion by Howard, her former boss.

Willis's decision to challenge Howard for DA was seen as a betrayal of trust, but for Willis, it was simply duty calling with no small dose of ambition. The next day, news broke about an unusual phone call made by President Trump to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, imploring him to flip Georgia's electoral votes from Biden to him. Willis began focusing on a narrower issue: where exactly was Raffensperger when he took the president's phone call?

Willis had been elected on a pledge to restore professionalism to an office engulfed in controversies and plagued by mismanagement under her predecessor. Most pressing was to take aggressive actions to address a staggering backlog of eleven thousand unindicted crimes, including hundreds of homicides, assaults, shootings, and sexual assaults. However, once she learned Raffensperger's whereabouts, she realized she would have to add another monumental case to her already overcrowded list of priorities: a criminal investigation of Donald Trump.

Local prosecutors in Georgia, the birthplace of the civil rights movement, are elected by voters and are bound to follow judicial rules of procedure and their professional ethical code. However, elected DAs also reflect the will of the people and often public passions. For Black people in Georgia, the right to vote was more cherished than any other right, won in a generational fight marked by state violence and humiliation. Fani Willis, a law-and-order DA, took on the investigation of Trump's efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia, arguing that if Trump had been successful in his pressure tactics, millions of Georgians, Black and white, would have been disenfranchised, their votes for Biden discarded so Trump could claim victory.

Willis' father, John C. Floyd III, was a radical activist who traveled through the South during the early 1960s, organizing and marching for voting rights. He crossed paths with many important civil rights leaders but drifted away from the lions of the civil rights movement into the arms of