‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’

by Meteor Staff from reports

Sunday, January 3, 2021, 12:31 pm  MST

In a recording of Trump’s call to Georgia’s governor yesterday, President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” the votes to overturn the president’s election defeat. Election experts said the call raised legal questions in an hour-long phone call Saturday.

In the recording of the conversation obtained and released Sunday by the Washington Post, Trump alternately berated and flattered Raffensperger, begged him to act illegally, and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, even threatening Raffensperger warning that he was taking “a big risk.”

Listen to excerpts of the recording:

The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”

Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.

But experts said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one. Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that the legal questions are murky and would be subject to prosecutorial discretion. But he also emphasized that the call was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt moral outrage.

“He was already tripping the emergency meter,” Foley said. “So we were at 12 on a scale of 1 to 10, and now we’re at 15.”

Here is the full hour and two minutes…

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