“Respectfully, President Trump: what you are saying is not true. The truth will come out,” tweeted Raffensperger.
Raffensperger’s comment was in response to a tweet on Sunday morning by the president, in which Trump said he spoke to Raffensperger on the phone in an attempt to convince Raffensperger to investigate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the November vote. According to Trump, Raffensperger refused to do so.
“I spoke with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and election fraud in Georgia. He did not want or could not answer questions like the ‘ballot under the table’ coup, destruction of ballots, voters outside the state, ‘dead voters and more. He has no idea! “Trump wrote.
The secretary of state’s office told CNN that Raffensperger would not comment further on the conversation.
Raffensperger, a Republican and Trump supporter, has consistently rejected Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud in Georgia. He oversaw three different recounts of the vote and conducted several other reviews of the process. He recently commissioned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct an audit of the Cobb County signature matching system, which determined the system to be 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.
Raffensperger and Republican Party state governor Brian Kemp, another target of Trump’s ire, repeatedly pleaded with the president to shift his focus from the November results to the second round.
“We just have to accept the facts of what happened in the November election,” Raffensperger told Fox News on Saturday. “I’m not happy about that and many conservatives aren’t either, but at the end of the day we want to make sure that we have a fair and honest election on Tuesday and that is why we will fight.”
Trump travels to Georgia on Monday for a final rally in support of Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Republicans are eager for the president to spend more time complaining about the November election than encouraging his supporters to vote for the Republican ticket.
This story is emerging and will be updated.