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Posted: 2022-06-21T17:01:18Z | Updated: 2022-06-22T11:33:13Z

WASHINGTON The Republican leader of the Arizona House of Representatives and a mother-daughter team of Georgia election workers told Congress on Tuesday about the death threats they received just for doing their jobs.

There is nowhere I feel safe nowhere, Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman told the House Jan. 6 committee. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United states is supposed to represent every American, not to target one.

Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, put human faces on Donald Trump s effort to overthrow American democracy, with testimony about the living hell their lives became after Trump and his legal team falsely accused them of stuffing ballot boxes .

High-ranking Republicans who stood up to Trump in 2020 suffered similar fates. Arizona House Speaker Russell Rusty Bowers said his office was so saturated with thousands of voicemails and emails from angry Trump supporters that we were unable to work, or at least communicate for days.

Bowers said that even recently, his family worries what will happen on Saturdays.

We have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with video proclaiming me of being a pedophile, a corrupt politician, Bowers said. And blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood, and leaving literature both on my property arguing and threatening with neighbors and with myself.

Tuesdays hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee portrayed the threats as part of a deliberate strategy by Trump to steal the election, a strategy that predictably resulted in the riot at the Capitol as Congress certified the final result.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a committee member and former federal prosecutor, said in his opening statement that when officials resisted Trumps entreaties to stop counting ballots or to certify him as the winner even though hed lost, the pressure only mounted.

This pressure campaign brought angry phone calls and texts, armed protests, intimidation, and, all too often, threats of violence and death, Schiff said. State legislators were singled out. So, too, were statewide elections officials. Even local elections workers, diligently doing their jobs, were accused of being criminals, and had their lives turned upside down.