“Donald Trump claimed he never asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in that state. Trump also said he had “the absolute right” to do whatever he wanted with presidential documents when he left the White House in January 2021. Both of those statements are false, and both go to the heart of potential criminal charges against the former president.
In a notorious phone conversation with Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, Trump pressed him to validate one bogus election-fraud claim after another. Among other things, Trump mentioned “300,000 fake ballots” that “were dropped mysteriously into the rolls”; asserted that “dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000”; said election workers counted Biden votes “three times” and took “18,000 ballots” out of “suitcases or trunks”; and cited a “rumor” that “they shredded ballots in Fulton County.”
Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, patiently refuted these allegations, saying there was no evidence to support them and no reason to believe that Biden had not in fact won Georgia’s electoral votes. Trump was unfazed. He insisted that all of the alleged irregularities amounted to “many, many times the 11,779 margin” by which Biden had won. “All I want to do is this,” he said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
Trump was frustrated by the resistance from Raffensperger and Germany. “Why don’t you want to find this, Ryan?” he asked. “What’s wrong with you?” Addressing Raffensperger, he asked, “Why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? ‘Cause those numbers are so wrong.”
If Raffensperger refused to “find the right answer,” Trump implied, he could face criminal charges. The conspirators who supposedly stole the election for Biden had committed crimes, he said, and “it is more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it….That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.””