New scrutiny befell the office of Georgia‘s secretary of state after the Washington Post identified a top staffer as the source of false quotes in a hit piece on then-President Donald Trump.
The Secretary of State’s office secretly recorded the conversation, mischaracterized its contents to The Washington Post and then attempted to delete the recording. It was recently discovered in a laptop “trash” folder as part of an open records search.
— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) March 15, 2021
The Post issued a correction this week to a January article that claimed Trump had directed investigators working on behalf of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud” in the aftermath of the 2020 election debacle.
The claim helped Democrats begin circulating their demands to re-impeach Trump, even before the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol, and was ultimately cited in their impeachment articles.
However, an audio recording of the conversation surfaced, proving that the quotation was false, despite several mainstream media outlets having claimed that they verified it.
All cited anonymous sources, but on Wednesday the Post acknowledged its source to be Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, who also served as Raffensperger’s campaign manager.
Although Raffensperger ran as a Republican in his 2018 campaign, posts to Fuchs’s Twitter account suggested that she was increasingly critical of Trump and dismissive of vote fraud “conspiracies” as the pressure mounted on her office to address and investigate the election-night irregularities reported in several counties.
After being identified as the Post source, Fuchs again downplayed the scandal by saying that the paper had accurately reported the substance of the conversation even if the quotation was not verbatim.
“I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call,” Fuchs told the Georgia Star News. “The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary.”
In the transcript of a widely reported conversation between Raffensperger and Trump—which the secretary of state is believed to have leaked to the Post, an exasperated Trump tried to lay out the findings from his campaign suggesting that pointed to nearly 144,000 ineligible votes in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.
Democrat Joe Biden’s official margin of victory was 11,779 votes.
Trump pleaded with—and at times seemed to threaten—Raffensperger over his refusal to investigate the claims, noting that even a small margin would flip the outcome.
Raffensperger, however, was adamant in insisting that his internal audits and recounts had verified the results. He refused Trump’s request to be granted access to the data in order to compare figures.
In a column Wednesday, The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway dismantled many of the false reports about Trump’s relentless effort to reveal the truth about what transpired in Georgia.
“[A]s legitimate as the lawsuit was, it entered a Kafka-esque world where it couldn’t get heard,” she wrote.
Hemingway also questioned Fuchs’ motives, noting her lack of experience in election management.
“That might explain why she has run the office more as a campaign shop,” Hemingway wrote. “Even the mildest of criticisms of her boss and their office meet brutal pushback, which has caused a serious deterioration with the legislature and many Republicans, even before the last few months.”
Hemingway said Fuchs’ social media attacks resembled those of the most virulent ex-Republican Trump critics.
“It doesn’t exactly build confidence that she knows what she’s doing, is able to separate her emotions from her work, or is capable of understanding legitimate complaints with how she manages elections,” Hemingway wrote.
Headline USA reached out to Fuchs via email for comment and will update with any response.
While it is now too late to sway the outcome, following Congress’s certification of the results and Biden’s inauguration as president, there may yet be some closure.
A judge recently agreed to unseal the absentee ballots in Fulton County, which encompasses much of Atlanta, in order to allow an election-integrity to examine the evidence—provided it has not yet been destroyed.
The GOP-led state legislature also is moving forward with a raft of reform laws to undo the damage after Raffensperger unilaterally settled a lawsuit brought by activist Stacey Abrams and national Democrats, which paved the way for much of the fraud.
However, several “woke” corporations have already expressed their opposition, including Coca-Cola and Home Depot.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who also faced sharp GOP criticism for his squishy response to the election fraud, remained noncommittal as to whether he would sign the legislation.
