Wandrea "Shaye" Moss was the last witness to testify before the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, detailing the terrifying smear campaign against her led by former President Donald Trump in the wake of the 2020 election. Trump mentioned Moss’ mother’s name, Ruby Freeman, 18 times in a phone call, making incendiary and baseless allegations against the family in his quest to get the election overturned. It wasn’t just Trump who was willing to attack Moss and her family: Rudy Giuliani made the racist—and once again untrue—allegation that she and her mother were using USB sticks to deliver fake votes “as if they were heroin or cocaine.”
Moss spoke repeatedly about how much she regretted that her position may have put her family in danger, but it’s not Moss’ fault a lynch mob went after her for simply doing her job, nor is it her fault that those very same voters and Trump-aligned figures set sights on Freeman, and even on Moss’ grandmother. A group of voters went to Moss’ grandmother’s home to try to do some type of citizen’s arrest—which is simply not legal but absolutely menacing all the same. “This woman is my everything. I've never heard or seen her cry. She called me screaming at the top of her lungs,” Moss said, recalling when a mob of voters went to her grandmother’s house.
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Since those terrifying moments, Moss says she’s barely left the house and has had an extremely difficult time coping with what happened, to the point that it has impacted her physical health.
Freeman similarly said that though she’d built a business on her name, she was now afraid to be identified. “It has turned my life upside down,” Moss said towards the end of her testimony. “It’s affected my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies from me doing my job; the same thing I’ve been doing forever.”
Now Moss no longer feels comfortable being an election worker and has left that position.
The insurrection has claimed lives and changed lives in profound ways, and it’s heartbreaking to see Moss and her family targeted by sycophantic Trump fans for the sake of the losing president’s bruised ego.