Prosecutors in Georgia have started a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the state’s election results. The Fulton County District Attorney’s office launched the probe over Trump’s attempted coup, including a call pressuring Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him, NPR reported. Raffensperger’s attorney had the foresight to tape the call, and they made it public. Trump truly sounded like a mob boss during the jaw-dropping call in which he begged the Republican Secretary of State to find him some votes. During his attempts to pressure Raffensperger into changing the election results. The former president said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” the number needed to overcome Joe Biden’s advantage in Georgia.
Channel 2 in Atlanta spoke with Raffensperger about what was going on behind the scenes. One Raffensperger aide told the outlet that she was so petrified that she and colleagues felt the need to get attorneys “for just doing our jobs.”
“I knew that we had to stand on the truth, and we had to follow the numbers,” Raffensberger said. “My dad, you know, brought me up to have integrity.”
“Raffensperger said that in the waning days of the Trump administration, around the time of the U.S. Senate runoff election, there were concerns in the upper levels of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office about the possibility of the federal criminal justice system being used inappropriately for political retaliation,” the outlet reports. “The fears were so strong that Raffensperger and other key staffers retained their own personal attorneys.”
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Raffensperger previously had concerns about the possibility of wrongful prosecution, but that has passed.
“We’re gonna fight hard to make sure we have honest and fair elections with the appropriate balance of accessibility and security,” Raffensperger said.
In the call with Raffensperger, Trump, aside from asking the Secretary of State to “find” votes, also made some unfounded claims.
“They are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I’ve heard,” Trump said on the recorded call. “And they are removing machinery, and they’re moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal finds. And you can’t let it happen, and you are letting it happen.”
And none of what Trump said is true.
Featured image via Michael Vadon/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
