Just days before the Electoral College meets to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election and Georgia prepares for its special runoff election, President Trump held a conference call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other officials where he badgered them about election fraud, repeated baseless claims of rigged elections, and ultimately asked Georgia officials if they could “find votes” and ultimately overturn the results of the election which showed President-Elect Joe Biden winning the state and securing its electoral votes. This was shortly after a tweet in which he appeared to denounce Georgia Senate hopefuls Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
In the hour-long phone call, which reportedly took place on Saturday and was obtained by The Washington Post, Trump can be heard repeating claims of fraud including shredded votes, miscounted votes, and manipulated or destroyed Dominion servers.
In one excerpt of the call, Trump says, “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 people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump can be heard saying in another excerpt to which Raffensperger can be heard responding with: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
The audio was released after Trump retweeted a Breitbart story that indicated that he had spoken to Georgia legislators about election fraud.
Raffensperger responded by delivering a strong tweet regarding the call ton Sunday, which read, “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”
Raffensperger wasn’t the only Georgia official to be on the receiving end of Trump’s anger. Early Sunday morning, Trump retweeted a tweet asking “Why are my own #GA Senators @KLoeffler & @Perduesenate not supporting this effort?” So far Loeffler and Perdue have not indicated that they will join Republican efforts to overturn the election.
Their special runoff election takes place on Tuesday, January 5.
