‘Find the fraud’: Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction
By
Jan. 9, 2021 at 11:20 a.m. CST
President Trump urged
Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a lengthy December
phone call, saying the official would be a “national hero,” according to an
individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of the sensitivity of the conversation.
Trump placed the call
to the investigations chief for the Georgia secretary of state’s office shortly
before Christmas — while the individual was leading an inquiry into allegations
of ballot fraud in Cobb County, in the suburbs of Atlanta, according to people
familiar with the episode.
The president’s
attempts to intervene in an ongoing investigation could amount to obstruction
of justice or other criminal violations, legal experts said, though they
cautioned a case could be difficult to prove.
Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger had launched the inquiry following allegations that Cobb
election officials had improperly accepted mail ballots with signatures that
did not match those on file — claims that state officials ultimately concluded
had no merit.
In an interview with
The Washington Post on Friday, Raffensperger confirmed that Trump had placed
the Dec. 23 call. He said he was not familiar with the specifics of what the
president said in the conversation with his chief investigator, but said it was
inappropriate for Trump to have tried to intervene in the case.
“That was an ongoing
investigation,” Raffensperger said. “I don’t believe that an elected official
should be involved in that process.”
The Post is
withholding the name of the investigator, who did not respond to repeated
requests for comment, because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at
election officials.
The White House did
not respond to requests for comment.
Since Election Day,
Trump has made at least three calls to government officials in Georgia in an
attempt to subvert President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, beginning with a conversation with Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in early
December to berate him for certifying the state’s election results.
The president is
furious with both Raffensperger and Kemp, who have refused to echo his claims
that the election was rigged. He has complained that they betrayed him after he
endorsed both of their 2018 elections. At a rally Wednesday in Washington,
shortly before his supporters ransacked the Capitol, he attacked them
personally onstage, calling the two men “corrupt.”
Trump’s call to the
chief investigator occurred more than a week before he spent an hour on the
phone with Raffensperger, pushing him to overturn the vote. In that Jan. 2
conversation, the president alternately berated the secretary of state, tried
to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal
consequences if the fellow Republican refused to pursue his false claims, at
one point warning that he was taking “a big risk.”
Legal experts said Trump’s call to the secretary of state may have broken state
or federal laws that bar the solicitation of election fraud or prohibit
participating in a conspiracy against people exercising their civil rights.
Trump’s earlier call
to the chief investigator could also carry serious criminal implications,
according to several former prosecutors, who said that the president may have
violated laws against bribery or interfering with an ongoing probe.
“Oh my god, of course
that’s obstruction — any way you cut it,” said Nick Akerman, a former federal
prosecutor in New York and a onetime member of the Watergate prosecution team,
responding to a description of Trump’s conversation with the investigator.
Akerman said he would
be “shocked” if Trump didn’t commit a crime of obstruction under the Georgia
statutes. He said the fact that the president took the time to identify the
investigator, obtain a phone number and then call “shows that he’s trying to
influence the outcome of what’s going on.”
However, such cases
can be difficult to prove, and legal experts said the decision to prosecute
Trump — even after he leaves office — would be a politically fraught one.
Robert James, a
former prosecutor in DeKalb County, Ga., said that proving obstruction would
hinge on what Trump said and the tone he used, as well as whether the
president’s intentions were clear.
Without the audio of
the call, it would be more difficult to prove wrongdoing, he said. The later
call with Raffensperger is more damning, he said, because of the power of the
audio that was made public.
“He says, ‘Go find me
some votes.’ That can clearly be interpreted as asking someone to break the
law,” James said.
In the wake of the
Capitol siege by Trump supporters, Democratic House leaders said Friday they
were preparing articles of impeachment that they planned to
vote on as soon as early next week. While they were focused primarily on
Trump’s role in inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol, an
early draft circulated Friday also mentioned Trump’s call to
Raffensperger as an example of “prior efforts to subvert and obstruct” the
certification of the 2020 election.
Audio: Trump’s full Jan.
2 call with Ga. secretary of 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)
Raffensperger briefly mentioned Trump’s December call
to the chief investigator in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America”
earlier this week. But the details of the conversation had not been previously
reported.
On the call, Trump
sounded much like he did while talking to Raffensperger, according to the
person familiar with the discussion — meandering from flattery to frustration
and back again.
It was one in a
series of personal interventions by Trump and his allies in Georgia since the
November election. The president has obsessed about his defeat in the state and
expressed disbelief to aides that he could have lost while other Republicans
won.
It is unclear how the
president tracked down the chief elections investigator. Before his Jan. 2 call
to Raffensperger, Trump had tried to reach the secretary of state at least 18
times, but the calls were patched to interns in the press office who thought it
was a prank and did not realize the president was on the line, as The
Post previously reported. White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows ultimately arranged the conference call between Trump, Raffensperger
and their aides.
That conversation
followed previous inquiries to state officials by Trump allies.
In mid-November, Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) reached out to Raffensperger to inquire about whether entire
counties’ mail ballots could be tossed if an audit found high rates of
mismatched signatures in those jurisdictions.
Raffensperger told
The Post at the time that Graham appeared to be suggesting that he find a way
to toss legally cast ballots. Graham denied that, calling that characterization
“ridiculous.”
Then in late
December, Meadows traveled to Cobb County to see for himself how the
ballot-signature audit was proceeding.
Meadows said he was
not trying to interfere with the investigation but just wanted to “talk outside
of the tweets,” Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, said at the time.
Meadows was not
allowed in the room where the audit was occurring, Fuchs said, but he was able
to peer through the window of the door.
Trump called the
chief investigator the following day.
Here’s
the full transcript and audio of the call between Trump and Raffensperger
Raffensperger
announced the audit on Dec. 14 after allegations surfaced that ballots were
accepted in Cobb County without proper verification of voter signatures on the
envelopes.
No evidence has
emerged of widespread signature-matching anomalies in Cobb or elsewhere in
Georgia. Raffensperger ordered the audit, he said, because his office pursues
all allegations of election irregularities.
“Conducting this
audit does not in any way suggest that Cobb County was not properly following
election procedures or properly conducting signature matching,” Chris Harvey,
Raffensperger’s director of elections, said at the time. “We chose Cobb County
for this audit because they are well known to have one of the best election
offices in the state, and starting in Cobb will help us as we embark on a
statewide signature audit.”
If large numbers of
mismatched envelope signatures had been discovered, it would have been
impossible to pair those envelopes with the ballots they contained, which are
separated to protect voter privacy as required in the Georgia Constitution.
In the end,
Raffensperger’s investigations team, working alongside the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation, found just two nonmatching signatures among more than 15,000
examined during the audit in Cobb County. The audit concluded on Dec. 29, six
days after the president called the chief investigator.
Trump was steaming
about the outcome of the inquiry when he spoke to Raffensperger on Jan. 2.
“Why can’t we have
professionals do it instead of rank amateurs who will never find anything and
don’t want to find anything?” the president said, according to audio obtained by The Post. “They don’t want to find, you know
they don’t want to find anything. Someday you’ll tell me the reason why,
because I don’t understand your reasoning, but someday you’ll tell me the
reason why.”
