President Donald Trump’s desperate attempts to pressure Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the Peach State have been revealed in a leaked phone call.
The Washington Post obtained audio of the extraordinary hour-long call on Saturday, in which Trump berated Raffensperger and Gov Brian Kemp to do anything they could to change the outcome of the Georgia election.
An agitated Trump was heard repeatedly insisting: ‘There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.’
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.’
Raffensperger pushed back hard, and often, at one point telling Trump: ‘Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.’
Trump’s comments sparked fury among Democrats, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris calling them ‘the voice of desperation’ and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez branding the call ‘an impeachable offence’.
The president was joined on the call by his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and two top conservative attorneys, Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Hilbert.
Raffensberger was joined by his General Counsel Ryan Germany and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp.
Below is a full transcript of the call first published by the Post:
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows: Okay. Alright. Mr President, everyone is on the line. This is Mark Meadows, the chief of staff. Just so we all are aware. On the line is secretary of state and two other individuals. Jordan and Mr Germany with him. You also have the attorneys that represent the president, Kurt and Alex and Cleta Mitchell — who is not the attorney of record but has been involved — myself and then the president. So, Mr President, I’ll turn it over to you.
President Donald Trump: Okay, thank you very much. Hello Brad and Ryan and everybody. We appreciate the time and the call. So we’ve spent a lot of time on this, and if we could just go over some of the numbers, I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made sense.
But we have a number of things. We have at least 2 or 3 — anywhere from 250 to 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls. Much of that had to do with Fulton County, which hasn’t been checked. We think that if you check the signatures — a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County — you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged. And we are quite sure that’s going to happen.
Another tremendous number. We’re going to have an accurate number over the next two days with certified accountants. But an accurate number will be given, but it’s in the 50s of thousands — and that’s people that went to vote and they were told they can’t vote because they’ve already been voted for. And it’s a very sad thing. They walked out complaining. But the number’s large. We’ll have it for you. But it’s much more than the number of 11,779 that’s — the current margin is only 11,779. Brad, I think you agree with that, right? That’s something I think everyone — at least that’s a number that everyone agrees on.
But that’s the difference in the votes. But we’ve had hundreds of thousands of ballots that we’re able to actually — we’ll get you a pretty accurate number. You don’t need much of a number because the number that in theory, I lost by, the margin would be 11,779. But you also have a substantial numbers of people, thousands and thousands, who went to the voting place on November 3, were told they couldn’t vote, were told they couldn’t vote because a ballot had been put on their name. And you know that’s very, very, very, very sad.
We had, I believe it’s about 4,502 voters who voted but who weren’t on the voter registration list, so it’s 4,502 who voted, but they weren’t on the voter registration roll, which they had to be. You had 18,325 vacant address voters. The address was vacant, and they’re not allowed to be counted. That’s 18,325.
Smaller number — you had 904 who only voted where they had just a P.O. — a post office box number — and they had a post office box number, and that’s not allowed. We had at least 18,000 — that’s on tape, we had them counted very painstakingly — 18,000 voters having to do with [name]. She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler [name]. That was the tape that’s been shown all over the world that makes everybody look bad, you, me and everybody else.
Where they got — number one they said very clearly and it’s been reported that they said there was a major water main break. Everybody fled the area. And then they came back, [name] and her daughter and a few people. There were no Republican poll watchers. Actually, there were no Democrat poll watchers, I guess they were them. But there were no Democrats, either, and there was no law enforcement. Late in the morning, early in the morning, they went to the table with the black robe and the black shield, and they pulled out the votes. Those votes were put there a number of hours before — the table was put there — I think it was, Brad, you would know, it was probably eight hours or seven hours before, and then it was stuffed with votes.
