Was Kanye West Involved With A Voter Fraud Scandal?

While Donald Trump is still spouting baseless claims of election fraud — all the while facing allegations of attempting to tamper with the results of the election in the state of Georgia earlier this year — it seems one former Trump ally could be involved in a tampering scandal himself. According to a December 10 story published by Reuters, an election worker named Ruby Freeman, who Trump and his camp previously accused of counting illegal and false ballots in Georgia in January, was purportedly visited by a person who identified themselves as a "crisis manager" and relayed threatening messages to Freeman in order for her to falsely confess. As Reuters reported, the "crisis manager," who did not give her name to Freeman at the time, was a woman named Trevian Kutti — who, in reality, was employed as a publicist for hip-hop mogul Kanye West.

Though Freeman did not cave into Kutti's demands — one which would have Freeman to lie about election tampering in order to add completely untrue credence to Trump's election fraud narrative — it also adds a bizarre layer to the story of how far Trump's cohort was seemingly prepared to go in order to keep their leader in the White House. So what exactly did Kanye West have to do with all of this? And is it possible he intentionally sent Kutti to Freeman's door, or that Trump had any knowledge of it?

Kanye West has a complicated relationship with Donald Trump, but has generally been an outspoken supporter of the ex-president. Even though it's no surprise that West was likely hoping for the November 2020 election to go in Trump's favor, the idea that the rapper would send an employee to intimidate a Georgia ballot worker into giving false testimony sounds absurd. While there's no evidence that Trevian Kutti acted upon West's directives, a police report and bodycam footage obtained by Reuters suggests that the rest of the story is exactly what happened. 

According to the documents and footage, Kutti told Ruby Freeman at her doorstep in Georgia that at the bequest of a "high-profile individual" (presumably West) in order to warn Freeman that if she did not say she had tampered ballots, "unknown subjects" would turn up to her home in "48 hours."  Freeman then called emergency services; a recording of the call contained audio of Kutti stating in the background that she knew that it would "disrupt" Freeman's "freedom," along with the "freedom of one or more of your family members." She also called Freeman "a loose end for a party that needs to tidy up." 

After an hour, Kutti was escorted from Freeman's home. A spokesperson for West later told The Washington Post that Kutti "was not associated with Kanye West or any of his enterprises at the times of the facts that are reported in these articles or since these facts occurred."