Another Trump Ga. call
Members of a special Atlanta grand jury investigating Donald Trump’s alleged meddling in Georgia’s 2020 presidential vote say they heard another recording of Trump pressing a top Republican lawmaker to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the Peach State, according to a report.
The phone call between Trump and late Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, which had not been previously reported, is the third time the then-president demanded that a state official override the election outcome, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In the call, weeks after Election Day, Trump insisted Ralston convene a special session of the Legislature to reverse Biden’s win in Georgia, the first time a Democrat won there since Bill Clinton in 1992. But Ralston refused. One of the five grand jurors — three men and two women — on the 23-member panel interviewed by the AJC said Ralston, who died in November, “basically cut the president off.”
“He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate’ . . . He just basically took the wind out of the sails,” the juror told the newspaper. “‘Well, thank you,’ you know, is all the president [Trump] could say.”
Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, claiming that the results were fraudulent and seeking his help to throw the win to him.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said on the leaked call. “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Audio has also surfaced of Trump’s December 2020 call with Frances Watson, then the state’s top elections investigator, asking her to examine absentee ballots in Cobb County.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis convened the jury shortly after the Raffensperger call was revealed and it first met in May 2022. The panel heard testimony from about 75 witnesses, including many allies and associates of the former president.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani testified, as did Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as well as Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger himself.
Jurors who talked to the newspaper were not identified and would not discuss the grand jury’s final report, which is under seal.
Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the jury, caused a stir in February when she embarked on a whirlwind media tour and told reporters “it’s not a short list,” in response to questions about who could be indicted in connection with the probe.
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