Defeated US President Donald Trump's effort to steal an election he lost decisively comes through loud and clear in a leaked phone call in which he is heard alternately pleading, flattering, intimidating, and threatening two Republican officials in Georgia into manipulating the results.
Attesting to the resilience of the democratic system, the two officials stand up to the President courageously, calling out his bogus conspiracy theories and maintaining President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
“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 says in the hour-long phone call which was first published in the Washington Post. He later adds, “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
The cajoling is interspersed with implicit threats of criminal prosecution and public backlash if the officials refuse to pursue his false claims of large scale fraud. At one point Trump warns Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that he is taking “a big risk” and that “the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump suggests. Raffensperger responds: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
The extraordinary phone call has led to calls for impeaching and prosecuting Trump on charges of violating laws for criminal solicitation of election fraud. Campaigning in Georgia, where two Senate run-off election that could decide the balance of power in Washington takes place tomorrow, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said Trump’s call was a “baldfaced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States,” and characterized it as a "voice of desperation."
"In any other conceivable moment in our history, this tape would result in the leadership of both parties calling for the resignation of the President of the United States immediately," the journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame said, calling it the “the ultimate smoking gun” and clearcut evidence of Trump’s plot “to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally try to instigate a coup in which he remains president of the United States.”
While several Republican grandees were also aghast at the Presidential overreach amid talk of a coup, Trump loyalists maintained he was well within his rights to demand state officials revisit the results, even though he made bogus claims that were bluntly rebutted by the state officials who also happen to be establishment Republicans.
At one point, Trump claims in the phone call that votes were scanned three times, only to be countered by Raffensperger: “Mr. President, they did not. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”
Another Trump claim: More than 5,000 ballots were cast in Georgia in the name of dead people, Raffensperger: "The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted."
Another time, Trump invokes a rumor to claim ballots were shredded. “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”
Raffensperger's counsel Ryan Germany responds: “No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.”
Trump: “But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?”
Germany: “No.”
Trump: “Are you sure, Ryan?”
Germany: “I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.”
Trump and his cohorts have repeatedly invoked bogus claims and rumors churned out by his conspiratorial followers and recycled in rightwing echo chambers such as OANN and Newsmax to question the result of an election that the Biden-Harris team won by more than 7 million votes and an electoral college margin of 306-232.
(With inputs from agencies)