The Georgia Secretary of State’s office opened an investigation Monday (Feb. 8) into a recent phone call between former President Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The call came as Trump and his attorneys attempted to settle two election lawsuits.
“The Secretary of State’s office will be investigating the complaints received,” Walter Jones, a spokesman for Raffensperger, told the media. He characterized the investigation as a “fact finding and administrative investigation.
“Any further legal action will be left to the attorney general.” Jones added.
The news was first reported by Reuters. The newspaper noted that the secretary of state’s office received a complaint from George Washington University law professor and legal activist John Banzhaf and two Democratic lawmakers that Trump may have interfered in the U.S. election.
The investigation, which will focus on an hour-long phone call between Trump, Raffensperger and their lawyers on Jan. 2.
On Jan. 7, Trump’s legal team voluntarily withdrew the complaint, citing an “out-of-court settlement agreement.
In a Jan. 2 conference call, Trump talked about the lawsuits and said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” referring to the number of votes that President Joe Biden (R) is leading in the state.
Trump added in the conference call, “We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.” However, Raffensperger’s team repeatedly disputed that claim.
Raffensperger later admitted that it was his office that called The Washington Post and leaked the conversation to the press.
“It was a private conversation. But the privacy was broken when he tweeted about it, but what he tweeted was not true.” Raffensperger said to WXIA Channel.
“If President Trump had not tweeted and remained silent, we would have remained silent. And that would just be a conversation between him and me, between the two of us, and we don’t see anything wrong with that. But he’s the one who had to put the news out on Twitter.” He added.
Trump’s attorney, Kurt Hilbert, condemned the leak, saying, “We are quite disappointed that the secretary of state and his staff secretly recorded and published this secret, settlement-seeking discussion.”
The full transcript of the conversation that later emerged shows that before Trump said he wanted to “find” the 11,780 ballots, he had asked election officials to investigate some specific allegations of election irregularities. In fact, he had repeatedly and publicly called for this in the weeks leading up to the call.
Those allegations included charges of “vote-rigging” and “corruption,” which President Trump said took away from his victory in Georgia.
“We have at least two or three witnesses that point to a total of 250,000 to 300,000 ballots that have been mysteriously added to voter rolls all over the place,” Trump said by phone, “most of which relate to Fulton County, which has not been investigated. We think that if you check the signatures – do check the signatures on the Fulton line – you’ll find at least hundreds of thousands of people whose signatures were forged.”
Raffensperger and his attorney, Ryan Germany, repeatedly denied Trump’s claims during phone calls, saying Trump was asking questions that may be inaccurate or have been proven to be untrue.
Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus of law at Harvard University, previously told “Just The News” that Trump’s comments to Raffensperger were taken out of context by several media outlets.
“He’s not saying that I want you to create votes,” Dershowitz said in the interview, “He’s not saying I want you to forge or make votes.”
“He’s been saying for months, on Twitter, in his statements, and from his campaign, that he believes that people voted for him and that those votes are not being counted.”
Dershowitz said, “He has the right as a citizen, as a candidate, to say, ‘I hope you can find those votes, I hope you can find those votes that were cast for me and weren’t counted, I hope you can find those, those votes that shouldn’t have been counted, those votes that were cast in the name of people who are dead, who don’t live in this state .'”
During the call, Trump asked the secretary of state to allow a full signature audit of Fulton County after the results of the Cobb County audit were not materially different from the vote count. Trump also asked if the Fulton County ballots had been shredded. Most complaints about potential voting fraud point to Fulton County.
“Through signature verification, we would have found hundreds of thousands of fake signatures, if you let us.” Trump said, “The only way you do signature verification is to compare the signature to the person’s signature from two years ago, four years ago, six years ago. You’re going to find a lot of signatures that don’t match.”
Trump said, “In Fulton, where they dunked the ballots, you’ll find that there are a lot of ballots that don’t even have signatures and a lot of them are forged.”
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