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
Jan. 3, 2021 at 11:59 a.m. CST
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 election experts said raised legal questions.
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 his assertions,
explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that
President-elect Joe Biden’s 12,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and
accurate.
Trump dismissed their
arguments.
“The people of
Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said. “And there’s
nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
Raffensperger
responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you
have is wrong.”
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.”
The rambling, 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 believing 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 lawyer whose
involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.
In a statement,
Mitchell said that 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 immediately 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 pressure Trump
put 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.
During their
conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan
Germany, the secretary of state’s legal 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 fraud on 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 get 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 put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts
said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy
investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him
to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.
But experts said
Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one. Edward B. Foley, a law professor
at the Ohio State University, said that the legal questions are murky and would
be subject to prosecutorial discretion. But he also emphasized that the call
was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt moral 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 disproven: 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.”
Trump did most of the
talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a
“child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was
widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for
endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his
claims of fraud.
“I can’t imagine he’s
ever getting elected again, I’ll tell you that much right now,” he said.
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 push back, saying one point, “Mr. President, the
problem you have with social media, that — 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 is 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.
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?”
Germany: “No.”
Trump: “Are you sure?
Ryan?”
Germany: “I’m sure.
I’m sure, Mr. President.”
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 also 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.
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.”
But he continued to
make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after more than an hour,
Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Trump, for
your time.”