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The White House
The BBC and other mainstream media went into meltdown today over a phone call on Saturday in which, they claimed, President Donald Trump had pressured Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to alter Trump’s election defeat in the state.
This allegation came from a Washington Post “exclusive”, a leaked audio recording and transcript of the hour-long call. The paper reported:
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 Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
The media zeroed in on this in particular:
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 unmistakeable implication was that Trump was asking Raffensperger corruptly to alter the result by whistling up votes that hadn’t been cast for Trump.
This Spectator column accordingly accused Trump of trying to suborn electoral fraud and likened him to a mafia gangster. Senior Democrats have called for criminal investigations of Trump’s behaviour. The Washington Post reported that “legal scholars” described Trump’s call as “ a flagrant abuse of power and a potential criminal act”.
Joining Trump on this call were were White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, attorney Cleta Mitchell and Georgia-based attorney Kurt Hilbert. Raffensperger was joined by his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs.
You can read the full transcript of the call or listen to the audio here. I strongly suggest you read or listen to the whole thing for yourself, and then make up your own mind about what took place on this call and how it has been reported.
