Democrats ask FBI to investigate Trump's Georgia
phone call
Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice say: ‘We believe Donald
Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election
crimes’
David Smith
in Atlanta
@smithinamerica
Mon 4 Jan
2021 19.26 GMTLast modified on Mon 4 Jan 2021 19.31 GMT
Two
Democrats have asked the FBI to open a criminal investigation into Donald Trump
over a phone call in which he pressured Georgia state officials to overturn the
presidential election in his favour.
The US
president berated and begged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election
official, to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state,
according to an audio recording made public on Sunday.
The
revelation prompted fierce debate over whether the call violated federal
statutes that prohibit interference in elections. Ted Lieu of California and
Kathleen Rice of New York, in the House of Representatives, demanded a case be
opened.
“As members
of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in
solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes,” they
wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray. “We ask you to open an immediate
criminal investigation into the president.”
Under US
law, it is a crime to “knowingly and willfully” deprive voters of a free or
fair election. Eric Holder, a former attorney general, tweeted: “As you listen
to the tape consider this federal criminal statute.”
During the hour-long
call on Saturday, Trump asserted disproven claims of fraud and raised the vague
prospect of a “criminal offence” if the Georgia secretary of state and other
officials did not change the certified vote count.
“All I want
to do is this,” the president said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is
one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Raffensperger,
a Republican, pointed out that Georgia counted its votes three times before
certifying Biden’s win by 11,779 votes. “President Trump, we’ve had several
lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the
contentions,” he said. “We don’t agree that you have won.”
Trump
insisted: “I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no
way I lost Georgia.” He pushed conspiracy theories circulating in rightwing
media, including that hundreds of thousands of ballots mysteriously appeared in
Fulton county, which includes Atlanta. Officials have said there is no evidence
of this.
Interviewed
on ABC, Raffensperger said: “It was pretty obvious pretty early on that we’d
debunked every one of those theories early on but President Trump continues to
believe them.”
The White
House had reportedly made 18 attempts to call Raffensperger during the past two
months before he relented. Raffensperger said he did so against his better
judgment.
“He did
most of the talking, we did most of the listening,” he said. “But I do 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 his bad data.”
Asked if he
considered Trump’s request to be lawful, the secretary of state replied: “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 rumours for the last two
months.”
Trump may
have violated Georgia state laws by soliciting election fraud. Raffensperger
said: “I understand that the Fulton county district attorney wants to look at
it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”
Fani
Willis, the Fulton DA, said on Monday she found Trump’s call “disturbing” and
if referred the case would “enforce the law without fear or favour”.
State law
is not subject to the presidential pardon power, which Trump has recently used
for allies and which some observers think he may try to apply to himself.
As with so
many past outrages, Republicans did not condemn. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s
leader in the House, told Fox News: “The president’s always been concerned
about the integrity of the election, and the president believes that there are
things that happened in Georgia that he wants to see accountability for.”
The
incident echoed a 2019 call in which Trump tried to strong-arm the president of
Ukraine to investigate Biden by withholding military support. That led to
impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate but a repeat seems
unlikely just two weeks before Trump leaves office.
Dick Durbin
of Illinois, the No 2 Democrat in the Senate, said Trump’s conduct “merits nothing
less than a criminal investigation”.
Bernie
Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, told MSNBC: “It is
unprecedented. It is the most consequential attack on American democracy in the
history of our country … This is what mafia does … This is beyond outrageous.
This is not only impeachable, it is certainly a criminal offence.”
The
revelations fuelled anxiety that Trump will stop at nothing to cling to power.
All 10 living former secretaries of defense published a joint article in the
Washington Post warning that the military should not be used to change the
outcome of the election.
The tape
also threatened to upend runoff elections in Georgia that will determine
control of the Senate. Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have backed
Trump. Party infighting could lead some voters to stay home in protest.
Georgia
would not be enough to tilt the election to Trump. Biden won the electoral
college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million. A dozen senators
and more than 100 Republicans in the House plan to object when Congress meets
to certify the results on Wednesday.
Trump
continued to rail against members unwilling to join the effort, tweeting: “The
‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican party will go down in infamy as weak
and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our nation, who were willing to accept the
certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!”
For two
months Trump has been claiming his loss to Biden was the result of fraud.
Numerous reviews have rejected those claims and dozens of lawsuits have failed.
Hillary
Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, tweeted: “Georgia voters, along
with a clear majority of Americans, chose Joe Biden to be their president.
Trump can’t change that, no matter how many oaths he breaks.”
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