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Coffee County, Georgia, seems an unlikely setting for espionage. It sits far from the intrigues of Washington, far from the coming politico-criminal trials in Atlanta. Far, in a sense, from anywhere.
As they jetted in in January 2021, the team working on Trump’s behalf might have noticed the openness — the emptiness — of the landscape: now the gold of hay fields, now the green of peanuts. They touched down at the tiny airport where, just outside the runway fence, an apparently crashed passenger plane sits decaying, nose in the soil. On the main road they passed Harvey’s grocery, and The Painted Lady antiques shop. In downtown Douglas, the county seat, they met the Coffee County elections director, Misty Hampton. And today they’re under indictment for tampering with the literal machinery of democracy; for conspiring, in the end, to overthrow the will of the American people.