Ugly stuff
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html?utm_content=con_Tx_politics_trumpgaexclusive&utm_medium=email&utm_source=acquisition&utm_campaign=pw_acq_con_010521
‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump
pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor
Amy Gardner
President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia
secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an
extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that legal scholars described as a
flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump
alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and
threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state
refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was
taking “a big risk.”
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected
Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked
conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in
Georgia was fair and accurate.
President Trump walks to the Oval Office after returning from Florida on
Thursday. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
Trump dismissed their arguments.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry,” he
said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve
recalculated.”
Raffensperger responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is,
the data you have is wrong.”
Read the full transcript of the Trump-Raffensperger call
At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want
to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Listen to the full Jan. 2 phone call. This audio has been edited to remove the
name of an individual about whom the president makes unsubstantiated
allegations. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
He later added: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000
votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse
of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling
or unable to let the matter go and still asserting he can reverse the results
in enough battleground states to remain in office.
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and
again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Several of his allies were on the line as he spoke, including White House Chief
of Staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a prominent GOP
attorney whose involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.
In a statement, Mitchell said Raffensperger’s office “has made many statements
over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with
the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same
thing: show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our
numbers are wrong.”
The White House, the Trump campaign and Meadows did not respond to a request
for comment.
Raffensperger’s office declined to comment.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the
secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the
‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead
voters, and more. He has no clue!”
Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump:
What you’re saying is not true.”
The details of the call drew demands from top Democrats for criminal
investigations. Campaigning in Georgia, Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris
called Trump’s conversation a “baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president
of the United States.” Biden’s top campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, said the
recording “captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault
on American democracy.”
Republicans, however, were largely silent. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), when asked
about the call while campaigning in Georgia on Sunday for the two GOP senators
who face a runoff Tuesday, dodged the question completely.
Trump’s pressure campaign on Raffensperger is the latest example of his attempt
to subvert the outcome of the Nov. 3 election through personal outreach to
state Republican officials. He previously invited Michigan Republican state
leaders to the White House, pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to
try to replace that state’s electors and asked the speaker of the Pennsylvania
House of Representatives to help reverse his loss in that state.
His call to Raffensperger came as scores of Republicans have pledged to
challenge the electoral college’s vote for Biden when Congress convenes for a
joint session on Wednesday. Republicans do not have the votes to successfully
thwart Biden’s victory, but Trump has urged supporters to travel to Washington
to protest the outcome, and state and federal officials are already bracing for
clashes outside the Capitol.
Growing number of Trump loyalists in the Senate vow to challenge Biden’s victory
During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger
and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if
they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally
destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence
— they would be subject to criminal liability.
“That’s a criminal offense,” he said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a
big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
Trump also told Raffensperger that failure to act by Tuesday would jeopardize
the political fortunes of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Georgia’s two
Republican senators whose fate in that day’s runoff elections will determine
control of the U.S. Senate.
Trump said he plans to talk about the alleged fraud Monday, when he is
scheduled to lead an election eve rally in Dalton, Ga. — a message that could
further muddle the efforts of Republicans to draw their voters out.
“You have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the
president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump
said. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t
going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because
they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it. And they’re going
to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be
straightened out before the election.”
Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger echoed his effort to persuade the
Ukrainian president to investigate Biden on a call that led to his impeachment,
and once again put him in legally questionable territory, legal scholars said.
By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators
who “want to find answers,” the president appeared to be encouraging him to
doctor the election outcome in Georgia, which could violate both state and
federal law.
Additionally, Trump’s apparent threat of criminal consequences if Raffensperger
failed to act could be seen as an attempt at extortion and a suggestion that he
might deploy the Justice Department to launch an investigation, they said.
“The president is either knowingly attempting to coerce state officials into
corrupting the integrity of the election or is so deluded that he believes what
he’s saying,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New
York University, who noted that Trump’s actions may have violated several
federal statutes.
But Pildes said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one, and he emphasized
that focusing on whether he committed a crime could deflect attention from the
“simple, stark, horrific fact that we have a president trying to use the powers
of his office to pressure state officials into committing election fraud to
keep him in office.”
Prosecutors would likely exercise discretion in considering a case against an
outgoing president, experts said. Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio
State University, said the legal questions are murky, and it could be difficult
to prove that Trump knew he was encouraging illegal behavior. But Foley also
emphasized that the call was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt
outrage.
“He was already tripping the emergency meter,” Foley said. “So we were at 12 on
a scale of 1 to 10, and now we’re at 15.”
Throughout the call, Trump detailed an exhaustive list of disinformation and
conspiracy theories to support his position. He claimed without evidence that
he had won Georgia by at least a half-million votes. He floated a barrage of
assertions that have been investigated and disproved: that thousands of dead
people voted; that an Atlanta election worker scanned 18,000 forged ballots
three times each and “100 percent” were for Biden; that thousands more voters
living out of state came back to Georgia illegally just to vote in the election.
“So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not
fair to take it away from us like this,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be very
costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine
it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find
answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”
Election results under attack: Here are the facts
Trump did most of the talking. He was angry and impatient, calling
Raffensperger a “child,” and said law enforcement officials were “either
dishonest or incompetent” for not finding widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta.
He twice called himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in
particular contempt for not embracing his claims.
“I can’t imagine he’s ever getting elected again, I’ll tell you that much right
now,” he said of the governor.
He also took aim at Kemp’s 2018 opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, trying to
shame Raffensperger with the idea that his refusal to embrace fraud has helped
her and Democrats generally. “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you,” he said.
“She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’ What she’s
done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you.”
The secretary of state repeatedly sought to correct Trump, saying at one point,
“Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say
anything.”
“Oh this isn’t social media,” Trump retorted. “This is Trump media. It’s not
social media. It’s really not. It’s not social media. I don’t care about social
media. I couldn’t care less.”
At another point, Trump claimed that votes were scanned three times: “Brad, why
did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.”
Raffensperger responded: “Mr. President, they did not. We did an audit of that,
and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”
Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to
Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of
victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as
happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”
His desperation was perhaps most pronounced during an exchange with Germany,
Raffensperger’s general counsel, in which he openly begged for validation.
Trump: “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?
Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines.
That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you
know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”
Germany responded: “No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton
County.”
Trump: “But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them
with other parts?”
Trump: “Are you sure, Ryan?”
Germany: “I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.”
Despite Trump’s intense hunt for voter fraud, officials in key states have so
far identified just a small number of possible cases
It was clear from the call that Trump has surrounded himself with aides who
have fed his false perceptions that the election was stolen. When he claimed
that more than 5,000 ballots were cast in Georgia in the name of dead people,
Raffensperger responded forcefully: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people
that were dead that voted.”
But later, Meadows said, “I can promise you there are more than that.”
Another Trump lawyer on the call, Kurt Hilbert, accused Raffensperger’s office
of refusing to turn over data to assess evidence of fraud, and he claimed
awareness of at least 24,000 illegally cast ballots that would flip the result
to Trump.
“It stands to reason that if the information is not forthcoming, there’s
something to hide,” Hilbert said. “That’s the problem that we have.”
Reached by phone Sunday, Hilbert declined to comment.
For her part, Mitchell contradicted Trump on several occasions on the call,
saying, “Well, I don’t know about that,” when the president alleged that a
Fulton County election worker had triple-counted 18,000 ballots for Biden. She
claimed that the extent of the fraud is unclear because Raffensperger’s office
has not shared all the data Trump’s lawyers have sought.
“We never had the records that you have,” she said. Germany noted that the
office is barred under law from sharing certain voter information.
In the end, Trump asked Germany to sit down with one of his attorneys to go
over the allegations. Germany agreed.
Yet Trump also recognized that he was failing to persuade Raffensperger or
Germany of anything, saying toward the end, “I know this phone call is going
nowhere.”
“Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan?” he asked of Germany. “What’s wrong
with you? I heard your lawyer is very difficult, actually, but I’m sure you’re
a good lawyer. You have a nice last name.”
But he continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after
roughly an hour, Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you,
President Trump, for your time.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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