Donald Trump was treated as a PRANK CALLER 18 times by Brad Raffensperger's interns before he finally got through to demand the Georgia Secretary of State 'find 11,780 votes', official reveals
Donald Trump was diverted as a prank caller 18 times before he finally held his infamous call with Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where he was recorded threatening him and demanding he overturn the state's election result.
Raffensperger's deputy Jordan Fuchs told the Washington Post that the president was repeatedly diverted to interns in the press office, who assumed they were the victims of a prank.
So disastrous were the leader of the free world's attempts to make a phonecall that his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had to round up cell phone numbers to make Saturday's call happened.
The call became a growing political disaster for Trump and his Republican party when Raffensperger leaked the tape on Sunday after the president attacked him on Twitter.
Raffensperger appeared to be a rare Republican actually willing to speak to Trump. One of the president's own aides told the Washington Post: 'Most everyone doesn't want to talk to him about it [the election defeat] anymore. He's a broken record.'
The release of the tape – where Trump demands Raffensperger 'find' 11,780 votes and make immediate statements that he won the election – followed Trump's public attacks on the elected Republican official.
Raffensperger himself appeared on GMA Monday to say that he believed Trump could face a criminal investigation in Georgia, and to call Trump's claims of fraud 'plain wrong.'
A source said that the call came after 18 separate attempts by the White House to get Raffensperger to speak to Trump, which he had turned down. 'I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president,' Raffesnperger said Monday. When the Georgia official did speak, he had his general counsel, Ryan Germany, with him and recorded the call.
Raffesnperger revealed that the Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis was ready to launch an investigation, which she confirmed. The prosecutor said Monday she was waiting for a referral from the Georgia Board of Elections and said: 'Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.'
The tape's release has created a metastasizing crisis for Republicans. On Tuesday voters in Georgia decide whether Republicans hold its two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber or hand them to Democrats, giving Joe Biden's party control of the White House and all of Congress.
As the scandal reverberated, the fact that Raffensperger had recorded the tape and leaked it emerged in a Politico report which revealed that he only acted after Trump disclosed the existence of the call and attacked the Georgia Secretary of State on Twitter.
'I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia,' Trump tweeted Sunday morning from Washington, on a day when area golf courses were soggy from rain.
'He 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!' Trump wrote.
Trump's tweet referenced some of the allegations and conspiracy theories he raised in the hour-long call with Raffensperger, where the official and his counsel repeatedly resisted or sought to counter Trump's repeated claims.
'Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out,' Raffensperger replied Sunday at about 10:30 AM from his official account.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, took part in an hour-long recorded phone call where President Trump told him to 'find' 11,780 votes, which would make him the winner
Trump wrote Sunday that Raffensperger 'has no clue!' What followed was a leak that has Trump facing potential criminal exposure, although it is unclear if he would be prosecuted for laws that prohibit knowingly pressuring an election official
Hanging in the balance: Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic Senate candidates, held a rally Monday ahead of an appearance by Joe Biden in Georgia. If Democrats depose both Republican senators in the run-offs, they will control the Senate. Republicans are warning that Trump's leaked call could cost the party the election
Campaigning solo: Republican Kelly Loeffler hit the trail in Canton and is expected to appear with Trump Monday night, but David Perdue is quarantining after exposure to someone with COVID
'Disgusting.' David Perdue appeared from quarantine on Fox News to slam leak of the call and to claim that Trump was right that there was fraud in the November election
Later Sunday, the Washington Post reported on the stunning phone call, having obtained a copy of the complete conversation.
The call came on a day 11 Republican senators joined Trump ally Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in saying they would challenge the electoral vote count Wednesday in multiple states Trump lost.
The phone call has the potential to impact the critical Georgia Senate runoff elections on Tuesday – and could even put Trump on the wrong side of criminal statutes barring interference in elections.
'All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,' Trump says on the call. 'There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you've recalculated.'
Raffensperger previously accused South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally and golf partner, of calling him and asking him to toss out ballots. Graham acknowledged the call but denied the pressure, which appears to have prompted Raffensperger's team to record his conversation with Trump.
The call that finally took place Saturday, following state certification and a recount, came after the White House sought to contact Raffensperger's office 18 times, CNN reported.
When it finally did happen, Raffensperger and his team had evidence of the president's pressure.
'This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,' a Raffensperger advisor told Politico.
'So if he's going to try to dispute anything on the call, it's nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he's claiming about the secretary. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this,' the person said.
Raffensperger told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's 'Good Morning America' Monday he has 'been fighting a rumor whack-a-mole' and attacked Trump as 'just plain wrong.'
'Did you consider it a lawful request when the president asked you to find the votes?' Stephanopoulos asked.
'I'm not a lawyer. All I know is that we're gonna follow the law, follow the process. Truth matters, and we've been fighting these rumors for the last two months,' Raffensperger said.
'It was pretty obvious very early on that we debunked every one of those theories that had been out there, but President Trump continues to believe them,' he said.
'He did most of the talking. We did most of the listening but I did want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong,' he said.
'He did most of the talking,' Raffensperger told ABC host George Stephanopoulos. 'We did most of the listening, but I did want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong.'
'He had hundreds and hundreds of people he said that were dead that voted. We found two, that's an example of just - he has bad data,' he continued.
Trump on the call claimed the ballots were 'corrupt' and that failing to say so and make him the winner was a 'criminal offense.'
'And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you're not reporting it. That's a criminal, that's a criminal offense. And you can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that's a big risk,' Trump said on the call.
'Did you feel the pressure when he said 'find' the votes?' Stephanopoulos pressed of the Georgia Republican.
'No,' Raffensperger said. 'We have to follow the process, follow the law. Everything we've done for the last 12 months follows the constitution of the State of Georgia, follows the United States Constitution, follows state law.'
But a pair of Democratic House members urged FBI Director Christopher Wray to open an investigation into President Donald Trump's extraordinary phone call with Georgia's secretary of state.
'As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes,' Representatives Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York wrote in a letter to Wray on Monday.
'We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president,' they demanded.
The letter claims Trump made 'a number of other statements soliciting election fraud.'
Lieu and Rice claim that Trump is now guilty of committing voter fraud himself by attempting to persuade Georgia officials – through threats, flattery and otherwise – to conjure votes for him that are not there.
'The evidence of election fraud by Mr. Trump is now in broad daylight,' the two said now that audio of the full call is widely published. 'Given the more than ample factual predicate, we are making a criminal to you to open an investigation into Mr. Trump.'
News of Lieu and Rice's letter to the head of the FBI comes as Georgia State Election Board member David Worley sent an email over the weekend demanding the state open a probe into Trump's hour-long call with Raffensperger.
The sole Democrat on the five-person panel, David Worley, wrote in an email to Raffensperger – who, as Georgia's secretary of State, serves as the State Election Board chairman – claiming an investigation is required.
President Trump repeatedly pressured Raffensperger on the call, even suggesting that failing to declare him the winner was 'a criminal offense'
'To say that I am troubled by President Trump's attempt to manipulate the votes of Georgians would be an understatement,'Worley, who is a Joe Biden supporter, wrote in the email, according to The New York Times.
He continued: 'Once we have received your investigative report, it will be the board's duty to determine whether probable cause exists to refer this matter.'
Worley says the probe would help determine if the call violated Georgia law, including a provision prohibiting any conspiracies to commit election fraud.
Legal experts say Trump broke Georgia law when he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find' just enough votes to overturn Biden's election victory in the southern swing state.
If the investigation request by Worley were to find the law had been broken, the Election Board officials says it could ask Georgia law enforcement authorities to consider filing criminal charges or a civil case against Trump.
There are concerns, however, that the issue would end up needing to be settled by Biden's incoming attorney general.
Former chair of the Federal Election Commission, Trevor Potter, a Republican, told the Times that any decisions regarding potential foul play in the hour-long call between Trump and Raffensperger would likely fall on the shoulders of the Justice Department in Biden's administration.
'There is a good argument that Trump is seeking to procure a fraudulent vote count by stating that he needs exactly 11,780 votes and is threatening the secretary of state if he does not produce them,'Potter said, adding: 'But even if the Biden Justice Department thinks they have a good case, is that how they want to start off the Biden presidency? That is a policy decision.'
'We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president,' the duo wrote
Two Democratic representatives are demanding FBI Director Christopher Wray (pictured) open an investigation into President Donald Trump's hour-long call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
Representatives Ted Lieu (left) and Kathleen Rice (right) wrote in a letter to Wray Monday: 'As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes'
Audio of the hour-long Saturday phone call was published Sunday by the Washington Post, capturing Trump berating Raffensperger and Georgia's Republican Governor Brian Kemp, pleading they do anything they could to change the outcome of the election in their state.
He told the Republican officials: '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. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated.'
Several legal experts have come forward to argue that Trump's plea constituted a violation of Georgia's law for criminal solicitation of election fraud.
'The president asked, in no uncertain terms, the secretary of state to invent votes, to create votes that were not there,' Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, told Politico.
'Not only did he ask for that in terms of just overturning the specific margin that Joe Biden won by, but then said we needed one additional vote to secure victory in Georgia.'
The Post did not reveal its source for the audio, but experts noted that under Georgia law only one party in a conversation needs to consent to a recording, meaning that whoever turned on their microphone would not be legally liable.
The recording sparked uproar among Democrats, including calls for impeachment or for Trump to resign. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris called it 'the voice of desperation' and a 'bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president'.
Some political commentators compared the call to the Watergate tapes that led to the fall of past US president Richard Nixon.
Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who helped bring down Nixon's presidency, called it 'the ultimate smoking gun tape.'
Trump went on a Twitter rampage in apparent response to his detractors just after midnight, retweeting a string of videos in which his allies in Congress and the media defended his relentless efforts to overturn the results.
Both Kreis and Jed Shugerman, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, noted that Trump would not be able to pardon himself if he was formally accused over the phone call because the case would be in state court, not federal.
Kreis first voiced his legal concerns with the phone call on Twitter, writing: 'The most damaging part of the call is when Trump says that the Secretary of State should just say he 'retabulated' the numbers.
'It reveals that he isn't blowing off steam or sincerely seeking out the truth. His only demand is to have votes tossed or invented to fabricate a win.
Trump went on a Twitter rampage in apparent response to his detractors just after midnight, retweeting a string of videos in which his allies in Congress and the media defended his relentless efforts to overturn the results
'Between that and 'we need' the number of votes Biden won by plus one is just an astonishing demand. There's no way to read this other than a blatant attempt to pressure Georgia officials to lie and alter legitimate election results with a wink and a nod to a looming consequence.'
Shugerman agreed, tweeting that Trump 'arguably' violated both state and federal law by 'criminally soliciting election fraud'.
He added: 'Reminder: A presidential pardon has no effect on state criminal charges. Trump cannot pardon himself for the violation of Georgia state criminal law in his soliciting election felonies by Georgia state officials.'
Kreis told Politico: 'If I'm the president of the United States and my pardon power is not — does not extend to state acts, I don't think that in the last few days of my term that I would want to be engaging in activities that even remotely subject me to the possibility of state criminal prosecution.'
Andrew Weissman, a veteran attorney who spent 20 years with the Department of Justice, tweeted: 'Trump's statement shows he knows what the law is and he is doing precisely what it forbids: seeking to cause submission of false election results, and threatening folks to do that to book. Federal and state crimes.'
Meanwhile the head of the Georgia Republican Party, David Shafer, came out to defend the president on Twitter, saying that the call served as a 'confidential settlement discussion' of two lawsuits Trump had filed against Raffensperger in state and federal court.
'The audio published by @TheWashingtonPost is heavily edited and omits the stipulation that all discussions were for the purpose of settling litigation and confidential under federal and state law,' Shafer tweeted.
Contrary to Shafer's assertion, the Post's transcript of the call does make mention of the litigation. And the confidentiality argument was thwarted by Trump himself when he tweeted about the call earlier on Sunday.
Shafer also tweeted a link to a story declaring that Trump acted properly on the call, arguing that the transcript showed clear evidence of voter fraud - which was presented by Trump and repeatedly refuted by Raffensperger.
Chair of the Georgia Republican Party David Shafer came out to defend the president on Twitter, saying that the call served as a 'confidential settlement discussion' of two lawsuits Trump had filed against Raffensperger in state and federal court
Shafer also tweeted a link to a story declaring that Trump acted properly on the call, arguing that the transcript showed clear evidence of voter fraud - which was presented by Trump and repeatedly refuted by Raffensperger
In what the Post described as an incoherent conversation full of ramblings by the president, Trump repeated again and again that there was no way he could have lost the election in Georgia.
'The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,' Trump said on the call. 'And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated.'
'Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong,' Raffensperger responded.
The Biden campaign quickly seized on the president's comments, calling it proof of his 'assault on democracy'.
'We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state's lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,' Biden Senior Advisor Bob Bauer said.
'It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump's assault on American democracy.'
Harris reacted to the call during a campaign event for Georgia's Democratic senate hopefuls Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Savannah on Sunday.
'[Trump] called the Senate race in Georgia illegitimate … illegal and invalid … suggesting that the people of Georgia are trying to commit a crime,' she said.
'They filed six lawsuits — not one, not two — six lawsuits trying to challenge your voice in that election. And they failed every time. And the people's voice remains standing.'
'We know, were there not powerful people trying to mess with folks' right to vote, we would be talking about Governor Stacey Abrams,' Harris added, referencing claims that Abrams would have won the gubernatorial election in 2016 if it weren't for voter suppression by then-Secretary of State Kemp.
Kemp was notably silent on the phone call between Raffensperger and Trump on Saturday.
Shortly after news of his call broke Trump took to Twitter to repeat his calls of voter fraud in the presidential election.
'Sorry, but the number of votes in the Swing States that we are talking about is VERY LARGE and totally OUTCOME DETERMINATIVE!' he wrote.
'Only the Democrats and some RINO'S would dare dispute this - even though they know it is true!'
'The Swing States did not even come close to following the dictates of their State Legislatures,' he continued in a second tweet. 'These States 'election laws' were made up by local judges & politicians, not by their Legislatures, & are therefore, before even getting to irregularities & fraud, UNCONSTITUTIONAL!'
Later on Sunday night Trump retweeted a string of news segments with people defending his efforts to overturn the election results, including a Fox News interview with Florida Rep Matt Gaetz.
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