The jaw-dropping recording of the president’s phone call trying to bully a top election official into rigging the Georgia election results has prompted the question as to who recorded it and why. Donald Trump sounded more like a mob boss than a president, but we’ve become used to that. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his advisers were reportedly prepared for Trump’s move to overturn the election results, according to Politico’s Playbook.
The decision to record the call was inspired by a previous phone call that Raffensperger had with Sen. Lindsey Graham in which the South Carolina Republican, according to Raffensperger, asked him whether he had the power to toss out all of the mail ballots in counties in the state found to have higher rates of non-matching signatures. Lindsey denied that, though.
“This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one adviser told Politico. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”
Raffensperger adviser to @MarcACaputo on why they recorded their call with Trump: “Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.” @playbookplus pic.twitter.com/7IEQBheUoJ
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 4, 2021
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We’re sure that our raging narcissistic president will take that well. On top of that, Graham didn’t seem to want to participate in Trump’s attempted coup and called the effort to contest the presidential election results by Republican senators and senators-elect an unrealistic “political dodge.”
And another ardent Trump enabler, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), warned in a statement that the Republican effort to oppose certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory could “establish unwise precedents” and “take away the power to choose the president from the people.” Of course, Trump mean-tweeted Cotton on Monday morning for refusing to take part in his election shenanigans.
The Republicans enabling Trump don’t seem to understand why an impeached president whose polling never exceeded fifty percent, and who has divided this country, has a penchant for lying, with over three hundred and fifty thousand Americans dying on his watch, did not win the presidential race. Who would have thought that Trump’s lapdogs, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, would accept the results instead of participating in the president’s attempted coup?
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
