ATLANTA – The impeachment charge that House Democrats filed against President Trump stems from his role in inciting a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol last week. But included in the resolution is another element of Trump’s behavior that is also condemned as an abuse of presidential power: his pressure campaign to persuade Georgian officials to reverse his electoral defeat in the state.
Before inspiring a crowd of supporters to attack the Capitol, Trump had already sought to “subvert and obstruct” the results of his failed reelection effort, says an impeachment article released on Monday, citing in particular the president’s extraordinary intervention in Georgia.
Even if the Democrats’ second effort to remove the president from office fails or disappears, Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of Georgia voters will continue to resonate, both for the president and for politicians in Georgia. State election officials continue to face harassment and death threats. Several Georgia Republicans are now blaming Trump’s unfounded allegations of electoral fraud for the losses of two Republican senators this month.
And in Atlanta, the Fulton County District Attorney is considering whether to initiate a criminal investigation into Trump over a phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the president urged him to “find” the votes that would deliver Trump victory.
This call was part of a much broader effort by Trump and his allies to subvert the election results in Georgia. The effort lasted two months and was ultimately based on allegations of fraud that were systematically debunked by his Republican colleagues accused of overseeing the state’s election.
Gabriel Sterling, one of the most outspoken of those officials, said in an interview this week that the president’s effort was inadequate and rude.
“There was never a comprehensive strategy,” said Sterling, adding, “It was a series of tactical moves in an attempt to achieve a different outcome here. The president should not try to do things to put his thumb on the scale. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, no president should do that. ”
Trump’s relentless campaign to change the outcome drew public attention in a surprising act of intraparty discord six days after election day.
On November 9, the two Republican senators forced into second-round contests in Georgia, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, released a joint statement calling for the resignation of Raffensperger, a Republican colleague. The senators, who were both loyal to Trump, made fuzzy claims that Raffensperger’s oversight of the election was hampered by “poor management and a lack of transparency”.
An official in the secretary of state’s office, who requested anonymity because of the threats that were still coming, said the office learned that same day that Trump was behind the statement; he warned the two candidates that he would turn his Twitter account against them if they did not publicly request Raffensperger’s resignation.
The official learned of the threat by telephone with consultants from one of the two senators’ campaigns.
There have been other, quieter attempts to move Raffensperger, a Trump supporter and lifelong Republican, more firmly and publicly to Trump’s camp. In January last year, he rejected an offer to serve as an honorary co-president of the Trump campaign. He also rejected subsequent efforts to get him to publicly support the president, according to two state election officials. The efforts, which Mr. Raffensperger rejected on the grounds that he needed to be seen as impartial, were first reported by ProPublica.
The attack on Mr. Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, who is also a Republican, occurred as Trump watched his chances of victory dissipate, with decisive states counting mountains of absent votes in the mail that tipped the race in favor of their Democratic Challenger , Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In Georgia, David Shafer, president of the state Republican Party, attacked the vote-counting process in Fulton County, which covers much of Atlanta. Soon, a succession of Trump allies and advisers, some of them far more powerful than Shafer, began to put pressure on state officials to overturn the election results.
One of them was Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He called Raffensperger later that month and asked if he had the power to send votes from some counties, according to Raffensperger’s account of the call, which Graham contested.
The president launched a flurry of tweets that defied his loss and called a special session of the Legislature to consider nullifying the results. Conspiracy theories flourished on the far right of the Internet.
On December 1, Sterling, at an emotional press conference, begged Trump to stop claiming that the election had been somehow “rigged” against him.
“Sir. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,” he said, expressing fury over the threats that election officials and voters were receiving. “You have to stop.”
It was not. On December 3, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, went to Georgia for a State Senate hearing and made a series of misleading allegations of electoral fraud, even as officials in the Secretary of State’s office unmasked such allegations in a separate hearing. occurring just one floor below. The following day, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Georgia to try to get the state election results to be nullified and joined the state party.
On December 5, Trump called Kemp to pressure him to convene a special session of the Legislature to nullify Biden’s victory in the state. A few hours later, the president again criticized Kemp and Raffensperger at a rally that was supposedly intended to increase Loeffler and Perdue’s electoral chances.
Two days later, after two recounts, Raffensperger certified Biden’s victory.
By then, the schism within the party had widened. A senior official in the secretary of state’s office said at the time that the state party needed to “stop passing the ball by not handing Georgia over to Trump.”
In the days before Christmas, Trump called the principal investigator in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, pressing the investigator to “find the fraud,” said those with knowledge of the connection. At the same time, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, made a surprise visit to Cobb County, with Secret Service agents in tow, to see an audit underway there. (“It smelled like despair,” Sterling said in the interview. “It looked like a trick.”)
The pressure campaign culminated during a Trump call to Raffensperger on January 2, first reported by The Washington Post. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said in the conference call, during which Raffensperger and his aides once again rejected the baseless allegations of fraud.
Of all of Trump’s efforts to change Georgia’s results, it was this call, recorded and released to the public, that could end up causing him more problems. The impeachment resolution cites the call to claim that the president “threatened the integrity of the democratic system”.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to messages asking for comment.
On January 5, Loeffler and Perdue lost their disputes, giving Democrats control of the Senate. A day later, Trump supporters invaded the Capitol.
The ramifications of Trump’s false allegations about electoral fraud continue in Georgia. Sterling said his home, like Kemp’s, appeared on a website called “enemies of the people”, which the FBI concluded was part of an Iranian effort to halt the election.
“I was doxxed again last night at Gab,” said Sterling on Monday, referring to a website favored by right-wing extremists.
Georgia Republicans were already facing the frightening prospect of a Democratic Party reinvigorated by demographic changes and the growing aversion of Trump’s political style to suburban people. Now they are left with a poorly divided party between Trump supporters who continue to believe the election was stolen from him and those who believe that Trump’s struggle to overturn the results was misguided.
“I think the fact that President Trump went well beyond the date that Al Gore admitted hurt the Republican Party in the second round,” said Martha Zoller, who chairs Georgia United Victory, the most important political action committee that supported the candidacy of Loeffler. “I think he had a right to follow the avenues, but he should have called for peace and unity long before.”
The legal ramifications of Trump’s attempts to reverse the election here are uncertain – and complicated. Some law scholars said Trump’s call to Raffensperger may have violated state and federal laws, although many note that an accusation can be difficult to process.
A spokesman for Fani Willis, the new Fulton County prosecutor, did not return calls seeking comment this week.
In a January 3 letter to Raffensperger, David Worley, a Democratic member of the state electoral council, said there may be a probable cause that Trump violated a Georgia law on soliciting electoral fraud. State law makes it illegal for anyone to “solicit, request, command, harass” or otherwise encourage others to engage in electoral fraud.
In an interview this week, Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law expert at Georgia State University in Atlanta, said that Ms. Willis was facing a difficult decision to use her office’s time and resources to pursue the president, due to its significant challenges at home, including an increase in Atlanta’s crime rate.
But Kreis argued that the nature of the debate may have changed since the crowd attacked the US Capitol last Wednesday.
“Now, it may be worth it,” he said, “because there were real life and death consequences for these lies, as well as the president’s attack on state and local officials to fulfill his promise to overturn the election in a fight – democratic impulse . “
Astead W. Herndon and Nick Corasaniti contributed to the report.