President Donald Trump pressured a top election official to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat within the state, consistent with a call obtained by the Washington Post.
The Washington Post, which published excerpts on Sunday of the hour-long call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, said Trump alternately flattered, begged and threatened Raffensperger with vague criminal consequences in an effort to undo his loss in Georgia to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.
The newspaper said that throughout the decision Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions and told the president that he was counting on debunked conspiracy theories about what was a good and accurate election. The audio excerpts published by the Post confirmed that.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people within the country are angry,” Trump said, consistent with an excerpt of the recording published online by the Post. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
“So look. All i would like to try to to is that this . I just want to seek out 11,780 votes, which is another than we’ve . Because we won the state,” Trump said within the recording, insisting that there was “no way” he lost the state.
The White House declined to comment.
Raffensperger’s office didn’t immediately answer requests for comment.
Georgia is one among several crucial swing states where Trump lost the November 3 election to Biden, and where Trump has since made unfounded allegations of fraud and sought to overturn the results.
It comes after Trump claimed the amount of Covid-19 casualties in America is “far exaggerated” because the US coronavirus price passed 350,000.
The US President seemed to question the veracity of the official figures as he took to Twitter on Sunday.
He wrote: “The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is way exaggerated within the US due to @CDCgov’s ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low.
“When unsure , call it Covid.” Fake News!”
He also said vaccines are being delivered to individual states by the federal “far faster than they will be administered!”
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