WaPo admits blunder on Don

The Washington Post has admitted in a correction that it had “misquoted” former President Donald Trump as telling Georgia’s top elections investigator in a Dec. 23 phone call “to find the fraud.”

The correction on Thursday ran atop an online version of the updated original story that had quoted an anonymous source about the call Trump made to the official.

“Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that the Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source.

“Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.’

“The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.”

The newspaper appended a shorter version of the correction to the top of a story published online Friday that said an Atlantaarea prosecutor had opened a criminal investigation into attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results following Trump’s phone calls to Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The Washington Post said it did not name the state investigator because of the risk of threats to Georgia election officials, but The Wall Street Journal ran a story online Thursday that included audio of the six-minute call between Trump and an official the Journal identified as Frances Watson.

In the call, Trump claimed that he won Georgia and that “something bad happened.”

“I can assure you that our team and the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation] . . . are only interested in the truth and finding the information that is based on the facts,” Watson replied.