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Donald Trump's election case remains unaffected after cyberattack hits Georgia's Fulton County
Amidst a cyberattack causing chaos in Georgia’s largest county, Fulton County faces a widespread system outage, impacting phones, courts, and taxes.
A cyberattack on Georgia’s largest county disrupted its normal operations over the weekend, but it did not affect the high-profile racketeering case against former president Donald Trump, according to the district attorney’s office.
The chair of the Fulton County Commission, Robb Pitts, announced on Monday in a social media video that the county, which encompasses most of Atlanta, was suffering from a “widespread system outage” caused by a “cybersecurity incident”. He said the outage was impacting the county’s phone, court and tax systems.
However, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, assured that the racketeering case against Trump and others was not compromised by the cyberattack.
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‘All material related to the election case’ is secure
“All material related to the election case is kept in a separate, highly secure system that was not hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult if not impossible,” Willis’s office said in a statement.
The statement also said that the prosecutor’s office was facing “drastic” challenges due to the electronic court filing system outage. The website that hosts Fulton County’s online court records was showing a message that it is “temporarily unavailable”.
The statement added that the Atlanta police department was avoiding email communication with the district attorney’s office for fear of infecting its own systems. This was affecting the prosecutors’ work because about 85% of their cases originate from the Atlanta police.
Tump have not pleaded guilty yet
In August, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others for allegedly engaging in a broad conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia unlawfully. Four of them have already admitted their guilt and reached plea agreements with the prosecutors. Trump and the rest have pleaded not guilty.
Pitts said the outage was being investigated by law enforcement authorities.
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The FBI office in Atlanta said it was aware of the breach and had been in touch with the county’s information technology department, but did not provide any details.
Jessica Corbitt, a spokesperson for Fulton County, said on Tuesday that there was no timeline for when the outage would be fixed. She said most county offices were still open, but some transactions were restricted because of the outage, as per the county’s website.
