- Georgia’s top electoral officer, Gabriel Sterling, said Rudy Giuliani “lied” by presenting a deceptively edited video as evidence of electoral fraud.
- In a “60 Minutes” interview, Sterling debunked Giuliani’s claim about illegitimate ballots, saying the president’s lawyer showed only a misleading clip to Georgia state senators, despite having access to the full video.
- Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also appeared on the “60 Minutes” program, said Giuliani “knows that what he said is not true”.
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A senior Georgia election official said that Rudy Giuliani “lied” about allegations of electoral fraud by presenting a deceptively edited video as evidence, despite having access to the full images.
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s chief of operations chief of operations, made the comments in a “60-minute” interview that aired on Sunday, during which he described President Donald Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud as “fantastic, irrational “and” without any factual reality. “
Sterling, Republican voter and Trump voter, told interviewer Scott Pelley that Giuliani presented a selectively edited video to Georgia state senators as evidence. In a clip shown in “60 Minutes” by Giulani presenting the video, he calls it “a mighty smoking weapon”.
Giuliani’s video, which also aired in advertisements for Trump’s national campaign, claims to show boxes of banknotes taken from under the table and “added in secret.”
However, Sterling said the full video shows a different story.
—60 minutes (@ 60 minutes) January 11, 2021
He said that when election officials were told that the day’s count had ended, the un counted ballots were placed in safe and tamper-proof boxes and stored under the table. Shortly afterwards, officials were told that they needed to continue counting overnight.
At that point, the safe boxes of un counted notes were removed from under the table to continue counting.
Sterling said the president’s team always had access to the full video, but Giuliani just presented the state senators with the part showing cases being removed from under the table.
“Rudy Giuliani looked them in the eye and lied,” he said.
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“From my point of view, they intentionally deceived state senators, the people of Georgia and the people of the United States about this, to make this conspiracy theory continue and the misinformation to continue, which caused this environment that we are seeing today, “said Sterling.
Giulani did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Trump and his allies have repeated baseless claims by widespread voters and electoral fraud since the president lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. However, none of the claims were upheld in court and the Justice Department said it found no evidence of widespread fraud.
The belief of some supporters of the president that the election was fraudulent fueled the deadly siege of the United States Capitol last week, where many of the protesters shouted and held up signs that said “Stop stealing!”
Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, appeared on “60 Minutes” too, echoing Sterling’s claims and saying that Giuliani “knows that what he said was not true”.
“But our state senate did not ask us to go there so that we could refute what they said,” he said of the Republican legislature. “And it was really left as the truth of the gospel, and it was not. It was manufactured.”
Earlier this month, in a phone call that leaked between Raffensperger and the White House, Trump repeated baseless statements about the election and asked the Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to defeat Biden.
The day after the phone leaked, Sterling also debunked the president’s claims, which he said made him “scream” because they were so dishonest.