Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting former US president Donald Trump and 18 other allies over moves to overturn the 2020 US election results was subjected to racist online abuse, the Guardian said in a report.
The racist online abuse came after Donald Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, and attacked his opponent using the word “riggers” which the Guardian described as a thinly veiled wordplay on the N-word.
Trump took to Truth Social hours after the indictments were released and demanded that all charges against him should be dropped and predicted that he would be cleared of any wrongdoing.
He, however, did not take any names but said prosecutors are going after wrong criminal targets.
“They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!” Trump wrote.
Fani Willis, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and state attorney general Letitia James - the prosecutors investigating Donald Trump - are all African Americans.
The racial slur was picked up by his supporters on far-right social media platforms Gab and Patriot.win.
There were hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in them and those were used in a derogatory context.
There were social media posts targeting Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. These two Black Americans from Atlanta were falsely accused of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count by 19 defendants in the Fulton county case.
The indictment also accuses Trump’s allies of harassing the mother-daughter duo.
Many posts on both Gab and Patriot.win contained reproduced images of nooses and gallows and demanded that Willis and other jurors be hanged. There were posts which directly call for violence.
“I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe,” Willis wrote earlier to Fulton county commissioners and judges saying that she and staff received racist threats and voicemails once she began her probe into Trump’s attempts to revert the election results two years ago.
Trump has been accusing Willis of prosecutorial misconduct and racism. Willis has maintained that Trump’s claims as “derogatory and false”.
Trump has also attacked special counsel appointed to the case, Jack Smith, and has referred to him as “Deranged Jack Smith”. Trump has been warned regarding his behaviour by judges Tanya Chutkan and Moxila Upadhyay.