Trump Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Enough
Votes to Overturn Election
The president vaguely warned of a “criminal offense”
as he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call, according to
audio excerpts.
By Michael
D. Shear
Jan. 3,
2021
Updated
2:58 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— President Trump demanded that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state “find”
him enough votes to overturn the presidential election, and vaguely threatened
him with “a criminal offense,” during an hourlong telephone conversation with
him on Saturday, according to audio excerpts from the conversation.
Mr. Trump,
who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss
to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s
top elections official, that Mr. Raffensperger should recalculate the vote
count so Mr. Trump would win the state’s 16 electoral votes.
“I just
want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr. Trump said on
the call, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post, which
published excerpts from the audio on its website Sunday. “Because we won the
state.”
Mr.
Raffensperger rejected the president’s efforts to get him to reverse the
election results, which are set to be certified by Congress during a session on
Wednesday. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies in the House and the Senate have said
they will object to the results of the elections in several states, including
Georgia.
But Mr.
Raffensperger told Mr. Trump that he stood by the results.
“Well, Mr.
President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong,” he said,
according to the audio recording.
During the
call, the president offered several false conspiracy theories, including
debunked charges that ballots in Fulton County were shredded and that voting
machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with and replaced.
Ryan Germany, the legal counsel in Mr. Raffensperger’s office, can be heard
telling the president that such charges are untrue.
“You should
want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican,” Mr. Trump told Mr.
Raffensperger, who replied that “we believe that we do have an accurate
election.”
Mr. Trump
responded: “No, no, no, you don’t, you don’t have, you don’t have, not even
close. You guys, you’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Then the
president suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could be prosecuted criminally.
“You know
what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said. “You know,
that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that
happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
The
president confirmed the call in a tweet Sunday morning, claiming that Mr.
Raffensperger “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!”
In a
response on Twitter, Mr. Raffensperger wrote: “Respectfully, President Trump:
What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”
Michael D.
Shear is a White House correspondent. He previously worked at The Washington
Post and was a member of their Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the
Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. @shearm
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