On January 3, Amy Gardner of the Washington Post broke the news that in an hour-long recorded call, President Donald Trump repeatedly pressured Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to somehow change the results in the been to give you a victory. The Post published the full audio and transcript of that call, and received huge media attention.
Six days later, in the wake of the Capitol invasion, Gardner told a story revealing that Trump had a similar call with another Georgia official, Raffensperger’s chief investigator, Frances Watson. This time, there was no audio or transcript of that call available, so Gardner’s story was attributed to an anonymous state official. The official said that on the call, Trump said Watson should “find the fraud” and could become a “national hero” in doing so.
But according to a recent recording of the Watson call, Trump did not actually use those exact words. He said that she could find “dishonesty” in Fulton County, and that “when the right answer comes, you will be praised”. But the language of the quotes the Post attributed to Trump was not accurate. As a result, the Post had to make a prominent correction. Trump and conservatives are now despising the newspaper, and even some mainstream reporters are looking sideways and wondering how it happened.
The correction was well deserved – it is important that reporters (and their sources) be careful when assigning the exact language in the quotes. And it is a pity that these incorrect quotes spread so widely. (Vox also wrote about the Post’s story in an article that has now been corrected.)
However, Trump used the correction to state in a statement that “the original story was a scam from the start”, which is not true. The original story that drew so much attention was Trump’s connection to Raffensperger, of which we had the complete and accurate transcript all the time. It has not been corrected. Furthermore, it remains the case that Trump actually called Watson to insist that he won the state and that she should present evidence revealing fraud. “The country is counting on that,” he said.
Overall, the Post’s correction changes what we know about the exact words Trump said to Watson, but it doesn’t fundamentally change our understanding of what Trump was saying to Georgia state officials at the time.
What happened
For a reporter trying to reconstruct a phone call that happened behind closed doors, there is nothing more valuable than a recording. And for Trump’s connection to Brad Raffensperger, such a recording was made and provided to the Washington Post. We could hear Trump’s exact words and understand his full context. It was the gold standard of evidence.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than us, because we won in the state,” Trump told Raffensperger. Claiming that “totally illegal” fraud has occurred, Trump told Raffensperger: “You can’t let that happen, it’s a big risk for you and Ryan, your lawyer.”
If, however, a call was not recorded, the reporter must rely on the notes provided by a source or the memories of a source to reconstruct what happened. And due to the vagaries of human memory, this is where things can get a little confusing.
According to the Post, this is the chain of events that led to the story now corrected in Trump’s liaison with Georgia official Frances Watson:
- Trump really did have a connection with Frances Watson.
- Watson informed Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, about the call.
- Fuchs told the Washington Post what happened on the call. (He or someone close to him probably also told other media outlets that confirmed this story, such as the New York Times and CNN).
- State officials at the time said they believed there was no recording of the call.
- Recently, officials responding to a request for public records found a recording in Watson’s phone trash folder.
It is important to note that it does not seem likely that there was malice in the wrong quotes. The new recording (first posted in the Wall Street Journal) does not remove Trump from his responsibility. Trump is still inappropriately putting pressure on state officials to come up with conclusions that will rock Georgia’s outcome in his favor. And accurate quotes do not have a significantly different result. (If they had simply been paraphrased instead of quoted, there would probably be no objections to them.)
What seems to have happened is that Watson or Fuchs were a little sloppy in what was an exact quote versus a paraphrase, because they didn’t have audio on hand or strong notes.
The two differences that warranted correction were as follows. First, the Post originally claimed that Trump told Watson to “find the fraud”. What he really said was:
“If you can get to Fulton, you’ll find things that will be unbelievable, the dishonesty that – from what we hear – just good sources, really good sources. But Fulton is the main lode you know, as the phrase goes, Fulton County …
…. They abandoned the ballots. They abandoned all these bills. Stacey Abrams, really terrible. just a terrible thing. “
So, obviously, Trump was telling Watson that the fraud occurred and that she could “find” alleged evidence of it in Fulton County, but he did not use the exact phrase “find the fraud”.
Second, the Post originally stated that Trump said Watson would be “a national hero”. He did not say those words, but said (amid inconsistent and difficult to follow ramblings) that her work was “the most important” in the country and that when the “right answer” comes out “you will be praised”:
‘What you are doing is so important …
… is that you have the most important job in the country right now …
… When the right answer comes out, you will be praised! I don’t know why – they made it so difficult – they will be praised, people will say “great!”
… whatever you can do, Frances. It’s a great thing. It is an important thing for the country. So important. You have no idea, it is so important. “
Again, if a journalism medium uses quotation marks, it is important that these quotes are correct. The fallibilities of human memory make attributing exact quotes without rock-solid evidence an intrinsically complicated business. One wonders how many quotes in other stories or books from the mainstream media would have to be corrected if audio recordings in their exact language came up.
What the new recording does not do is present a substantially different image of what Trump was doing on that call than the original Post story. Trump, however, is aware of the fact that most people will only vaguely remember the details, mix up the Raffensperger and Watson calls and see reports of a correction regarding Trump’s call in Georgia. Those sympathetic to Trump or skeptical of the media will wonder if he has received a bad reputation for this bigger story. He didn `t do.