Sunday, 03 January 2021 (YJC)_ US president pressed Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victor.
In an hour-long phone call on Saturday, Donald Trump pressed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in the election the president refuses to concede.
The Washington Post reported that it had obtained a tape of the “extraordinary hour-long call”, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump reportedly said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
Raffensperger, a Republican who has become a bête noire among Trump supporters for repeatedly saying Biden’s win in his state was fair, said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
He also insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Trump did not win Georgia, which went Democratic for the first time since 1992. Its result has been certified and will stand. Attempts to pressure Republican officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, other battleground states, have failed, as have the vast majority of Trump’s challenges to results in court.
Despite promised objections from at least 12 Republican senators and a majority of the GOP in the House, Biden’s electoral college victory will be ratified by Congress on Wednesday and will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January. Trump will then leave the White House – where he remained, tweeting angrily, all weekend.
The Post said White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer, were also on the Raffensperger call, during which the president threatened legal action.
Source: The Guardian
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