President Donald Trump pushed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes to overturn the election results after his loss to President-elect Biden, according to an audio recording of a phone call obtained by The Washington Post.
In excerpts of the stunning one-hour phone call Saturday, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said in one excerpt of the call. Raffensperger responded, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
In another excerpt, Trump said, “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.”
The White House, the Trump campaign and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Post. The White House declined to comment to CNN.
CNN has reached out to Raffensperger.
The Post’s report was published several hours after Trump said on Twitter that he had spoken to Raffensperger on the phone in an attempt to convince him to look into unfounded conspiracy theories about the vote in November. According to Trump, Raffensperger refused to do so. In response, Raffensperger cryptically delivered a strong message to the President on Sunday.
Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out,” the tweet read.
Raffensperger, a Republican and a Trump supporter, has consistently turned back Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Georgia. He has overseen three different recounts of the vote and conducted several other reviews of the process. He recently tasked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with conducting an audit of the signature match system in Cobb County that determined the system was 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.
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