The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Trump’s plea to ‘find’ votes for a victory
US president Donald Tr u m p pleaded with Georgia’s election chief to overturn Jo e Biden’s win in the state, suggesting that he “find” enough votes to hand Mr Trump the victory.
The taped phone call with secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on Saturday was the latest step in an unprecedented effort by a sitting American president to reverse the outcome of a free and fair election that he lost.
The president, who has refused to accept his loss to president-elect Mr Biden, repeatedly argued that Mr Raffensperger could change the certified results.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Mr Trump said. “Because we won the state.”
Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Mr Biden’s win by an 11,779 margin. Mr Raffensperger noted: “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court. We don’t agree that you have won.”
Audio snippets of the conversation were posted online by The Washington Post.
Mr Trump’s renewed intervention comes nearly two weeks before he leaves office and two days before elections in Georgia that will determine political control of the US Senate.
The president used the hour-long conversation to tick through a list of claims
about the election in Georgia, including that hundreds of thousands of ballots mysteriously appeared in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. Officials have said there is no evidence of that happening.
The Georgia officials on the call are heard repeatedly pushing back against the president’s
assertions, telling him that he’s relying on debunked theories.
At another point in the conversation, Mr Trump appeared to threaten Mr Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, by suggesting both could be criminally liable if they failed to find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County
had been illegally destroyed. There is no evidence to support Mr Trump’s claim.
Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer called the recording “irrefutable proof ” of Mr Trump pressuring and threatening an official in his own party to “rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place”.