WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump pressured the lead investigator of the Georgia elections on a phone call in December to produce evidence of fraud in the presidential race, telling the person to “find the fraud” and to be a “national hero” for that, according with a person familiar with the call.
The December summons is the latest example of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the November elections, especially in Georgia, where President-elect Joe Biden won the president by almost 12,000 votes, becoming the first Democrat in decades to win the state.
The call was first reported by The Washington Post. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, confirmed to NBC News that the call had taken place.
Since the race was called to Biden on November 7, Trump has made at least three calls to Georgia officials, asking them to present evidence of widespread fraud in an effort to overturn the results. The first call was made to Republican Governor Brian Kemp in early December, followed by a call to the election investigator and a call to Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger.
Trump called the Georgia election investigator in December, while the individual was conducting an investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in Cobb County.
The White House declined NBC News’s request for comment.
Raffensperger told The Post in an interview that he felt it was inappropriate for Trump to interfere in the case, but added that he did not know what was specifically discussed in the December conference call.
“This was an ongoing investigation,” Raffensperger told The Post. “I don’t believe that an elected official should be involved in this process.”
Raffensperger announced an audit on December 14 in Cobb County in the November elections after allegations that some ballots were accepted without proper signature checks. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced on December 29 that it found only two incompatible signatures among the more than 15,000 votes included in the audit.
The inaccuracy came from a wife who signed her name on her and her husband’s ballots, Raffensperger said at the time.
In Trump’s call with Raffensperger last Saturday, the president asked the secretary of state to change the total vote and launched a flurry of discredited conspiracy theories about the election. NBC News obtained a recording of the phone call from Raffensperger, which was first reported on Sunday.
Trump has been obsessively working to contest election results since the media began to project Biden as the winner. The president and his allies filed more than 50 lawsuits across the county, almost all of them unsuccessful.
The president has a particular fixation on dropping the results in Georgia after becoming the first Republican presidential candidate in almost 30 years to lose the state.
Trump targets Raffensperger and other leading Georgia Republicans, including Kemp and Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, attacking them on Twitter and threatening to disrupt their political careers.
Trump has not yet formally conceded the race to Biden, but finally committed to an “orderly transition” of power on Thursday, hours after a violent crowd of his supporters invaded the US Capitol to interrupt the joint session of Congress ratifying the election results. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, were killed.
Biden will take office on January 20.
