In a stunning one-hour phone call reported by The Washington Post, the President tells the Georgia secretary of state, ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’
In excerpts of the stunning one-hour phone call Saturday, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said in one excerpt of the call. Raffensperger responded, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
In another excerpt, 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.”
“You should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican,” Trump said at one point.
“We believe that we do have an accurate election,” Raffensperger said in response, to which Trump replied, “No, no you don’t. Not even close. You’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
The President also claimed during the call that votes in the state were scanned three times, according to the Post, an allegation Raffensperger rebuffed, saying, “We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”
The White House, the Trump campaign and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Post. The White House declined to comment to CNN.
CNN has reached out to Raffensperger.
Raffensperger, a Republican and a Trump supporter, has consistently turned back Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Georgia. He has overseen three different recounts of the vote and conducted several other reviews of the process. He recently tasked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation with conducting an audit of the signature match system in Cobb County that determined the system was 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.
The Post also reported that Meadows, lawyer Cleta Mitchell and other Republican allies of the President were also on the call.
The call represents the latest extraordinary effort by Trump to change the results of the race he lost following weeks of legal and political efforts by the President, his legal team and Republican allies to overturn the free and fair election.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seized on the call in a tweet Sunday afternoon, suggesting to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas that he and his GOP allies should investigate the President for his actions.
Cruz was among 11 Republican senators who announced Saturday they would support an objection to the Electoral College votes, if one is brought, and propose an election commission to conduct an “emergency 10-day audit” of the election returns in the “disputed states” — despite no credible evidence suggesting widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
CNN’s Ryan Nobles contributed to this report.
