Democrats this week were gearing up for a do-over of last year’s impeachment charade—itself a do-over of the Russia-collusion hoax—following yet another alleged phone call in which they claimed President Donald Trump had made threats to aid his political agenda.
But there was no evidence of such threats in the actual transcript of the alleged call.
And, as with the original impeachment attempt intended to cover up the Biden family’s Burisma scandal, the dubious sourcing raised more questions of illegality about the leak than about the supposed offense.
Based on its trending topics, Twitter appeared to have quickly retracted its short-lived policy on censoring information from unconfirmed sources.
Many users of the left-wing social-media publisher chimed in after the Washington Post ran a story on what appeared to be an illicitly obtained recording of a phone call between President Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The dubious timing—days before a special runoff election in Georgia and a high-profile challenge of the Nov. 3 election in Congress—would seem to suggest a Chinese disinformation plot. The Washington Post was one of nearly 40 mainstream media outlets recently revealed to have accepted bribes in return for running propaganda favorable to the Chines communist government.
However, few were questioning the veracity of the call as they did with the veracity of a damning cache of data retrieved from the abandoned laptop of Democrat Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
On Sunday, Trump appeared to confirm the call by filing two lawsuits against Raffensperger for the leak, the Gateway Pundit reported.
The White House also reportedly planned to refer Raffensperger to the Secret Service under the Espionage Act.
Regardless of the call’s authenticity, holding Raffensperger accountable for his actions did little to validate the bogus claims made by the Post and other leftist outlets concerning the call’s substance.
Much of it, in fact, seemed consistent with the statements that Trump has frequently made in tweets and public addresses.
“We just want the truth. It’s simple,” Trump told Raffensperger.
The call included Trump’s chief of staff and several attorneys for both parties, as well as Raffensperger’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.
In it, Trump called on the Georgia officials to conduct a signature audit—something that Raffensperger has continued to resist, despite evidence of vote fraud.
“We think that if you check the signatures—a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged,” Trump said. “And we are quite sure that’s going to happen.”
While the amount of fraud may have been massive, Trump noted that Biden barely “won” the state even with the suspicious activity going un-checked. The president noted that the current margin of 11,779 votes in Biden’s favor could be surmounted by cracking down on the fraud in any number of ways.
That included an investigation into people who showed up on Election Day at the polling place only to be told that they already had voted.
Certified accountants would be soon able to provide an accurate count of those who “were told they couldn’t vote because a ballot had been put on their name,” Trump said. “And you know that’s very, very, very, very sad.”
Trump said that a single corrupt poll worker in Fulton County may have been responsible for some 18,000 fraudulent votes.
Although the transcript redacted the name, he appeared to be making reference to Ruby Freeman, who was caught on a notorious tape that showed workers taking out suitcases full of ballots after sending home GOP monitors by claiming there was a water main break on the night of the election.
Freeman—who has been linked to Georgia Democrats Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock—was later caught bragging about her and her daughter’s efforts to fix the outcome.
“She’s a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler,” Trump said. “… That was the tape that’s been shown all over the world that makes everybody look bad, you me and everybody else.”
After outlining several other examples of ways that election integrity was compromised, Trump reiterated his takeaway message: “So there were many infractions and the bottom line is, many, many times the 11,779 margin that they said we lost by—we had vast I mean the state is in turmoil over this.”
Trump continued to speak off the cuff outlining other areas of fraud—including those in other states—before Meadows cut in to bring the discussion back into focus.
“Mr. Secretary, obviously there is, there are allegations where we believe that not every vote or fair vote and legal vote was counted and that’s at odds with the representation from the secretary of state’s office,” he said. “What I’m hopeful for is there some way that we can we can find some kind of agreement to look at this a little bit more fully.”
Meadows said the aim of the dialogue was to open up different avenues than the damaging legal battles, which had led media to report on Republican infighting.
“I was hopeful that, you know, in the spirit of cooperation and compromise is there something that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious?” he said.
Raffensperger responded by saying he disagreed with the numbers offered by Trump, offering to do a point by point accounting of his own. However, the discussion went off track when he falsely characterized Trump’s position on Dominion Voting Systems.
“Going back, primarily what you’ve talked about here focused in on primarily, I believe, is the absentee ballot process,” he said. “I don’t believe that you’re really questioning the Dominion machines.”
In retrospect, Raffensberger may have been trying surreptitiously to ensnare Trump into a comment that would force legal allies such as attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood to abandon their efforts to expose the voting machine fraud in the state.
Trump jumped in to try to clarify that it was not a matter of whether he had a “problem” with Dominion’s actions as it was trying to best allocate resources to arrive at the same outcome.
“Not that there’s not an issue, because we have a big issue with Dominion in other states and perhaps in yours—but we haven’t felt we needed to go there,” he said.
“… Yeah we’d like to go further, but we don’t really need to,” he continued. “We have all the votes we need.”
Trump went on to indicate that due to the sensitivities and pressures involved in pressing his case under the microscope, he was focused on trying to do the minimal amount needed to right the wrong.
“We’re doing the most conservative numbers possible,” he said. “We’re many times, many, many times above the margin, and so we don’t really have to” delve into matters like Dominion as part of the election challenge.
Many mainstream media outlets reported on the Post‘s selective editing of the transcript to suggest that Trump had gone on to threaten Raffensperger.
The conversation proceeded to delve into many of the concerns that have been publicly raised by conservative media, but Raffensperger and his lawyer, Ryan Germany, continued to insist that they have done all they need to investigate.
Increasingly exasperated, Trump made additional appeals while maintaining his belief that his margin of victory was well beyond the number tallied by the certified loss and that finding the evidence of fraud would require very little.
“I only need 11,000 votes,” he said. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. Or we can keep it going but that’s not fair to the voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what happened.”
A frustrated Trump continues to press on why Raffensperger refuses to acknowledge the discrepancies and the clear evidence of impropriety.
“I’m just curious why wouldn’t, why do you keep fighting this thing? It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Raffensperger then acknowledges that he is basing the accuracy of his data not on credible evidence but on subjective determinations of activist judges like Leslie Abrams Gardner, a federal judge who refused to recuse herself from a ruling about vote fraud, despite being Stacey Abrams’ sister.
“Mr. President, you have people that submit information and we have our people that submit information. And then it comes before the court and the court then has to make a determination,” he said. “We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.”
Trump then became increasingly irate over the waste of time, reiterating that the state numbers are wrong while lamenting that “this phone call is going nowhere.”
He expressed his exasperation with the courts for refusing altogether to accept the cases, thus preventing the evidence from being heard.
Trump and his lawyers pointed out that without a court hearing, they have been required simply to rely on Raffensperger’s word even while their own analyses showed totally different results.
But Raffensperger’s lawyer stonewalled the request to make the data available.
“There are things that you guys are entitled to get,” he said. “And there’s things that under the law, we are not allowed to give out.”
After even more wrangling, the call appears to end cordially with a resolution that the lawyers for each party will get together and review the figures in greater detail.
Although the tense discussion raises the possibility of political and potential legal fallout for Raffensperger, it does not appear that Trump is ever requesting him to alter any votes, only to investigate the existing evidence of fraud.
