Two House Democrats are asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to open a criminal investigation against President Donald Trump after a leaked phone call showed him pleading with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn his state’s election .
“As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump was involved in soliciting or conspiring to commit a series of electoral crimes,” wrote representatives Ted Lieu, D-Calif. And Kathleen Rice, DN.Y. a letter to Wray on Monday. “We ask that you immediately open a criminal investigation against the president.”
During the call, whose recording was obtained by NBC News, Trump asked Raffensperger “to find” enough votes to erase President Elect Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is more than us,” said Trump. “Because we won the state.”
The phone call, which lasted about an hour, featured Trump repeatedly pressing Raffensperger to change the total vote while launching a barrage of discredited conspiracy theories at the Republican election official and his team. The president even suggested that if the Secretary of State did not act according to Trump’s wishes, he could be held criminally responsible.
“The people of Georgia are angry. People in the country are angry,” Trump said in the conference call. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you recalculated.”
Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, passed the call back on the president’s allegations – sometimes saying that his specific allegations of fraud were totally wrong.
“Well, Mr. President, the challenge you have is that the data you have is wrong,” said Raffensperger at one point.
In their letter, Lieu and Rice claim: “Evidence of Mr. Trump’s electoral fraud is now in broad daylight.”
“Given the more than ample factual predicate, we are making a criminal reference to you to open an investigation into Mr. Trump,” lawmakers wrote.
The president has spent much of the past two months working to reverse election results, lobbying undecided state lawmakers to disregard the total vote in their states and supporting legal challenges that have failed – generating strong criticism from Democrats and some Republicans.
But the recording of his conversation with Raffensperger led to a more severe response from Trump’s Democratic opponents. Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., said on Sunday that the president’s conduct was “impugnable”, while Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Said he “deserves nothing less than a criminal investigation”.
When asked at a Democratic leadership press conference in the House on Monday whether the House should take action on the call, Caucus Hakeem Jeffries President DN.Y. said he did not read the transcript of the conversation, but : “We are not looking back, we are looking forward to the opening of Joe Biden on January 20.” Jeffries emphasized that House Democrats are focused on dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis in the new Congress.
