There is a quote from Richard Wagner’s Ring operas, “Are you malignant, or simply insane?”
I’ve encountered people who were evil or crazy, and I believe it is best to be prepared for them to be evil.
I’m sorry. What?
Why did I get a notice to come back here? I don’t know where your votes are. Good day to you sir!
My response to Trump’s demands would have been, “Who do you think you are, the President of the United States?” 
(Granted, he still was a lame duck prez, but it would have really gotten his orange gelatinous blood boiling.)
Sure, you can wish for a perfect solution to your problem. But you call you wife and recite those John Lennon lyrics if you’re genuinely just hoping for a miracle. You don’t call up a decision-maker with lawyers on the line and threaten them with legal consequences if your altered song lyrics don’t come true.
I’m not sure on this. His language is quite compatible with him trying to get Raffensperger to fraudulently “create” votes, but he never comes out and says it. However, maintaining deniability is what you would expect from a person as experienced in shady practices as Trump.
However, skim reading the whole transcript, Trump is adamant that there are real issues with the count and he harps on that endlessly. Maybe that is because he knew he had to provide Raffensperger with “cover” for the crime he was asking Raffensperger to commit.
Or maybe he really believed it - Trump was at the time surrounded by toadies who were telling him whatever he wanted to hear. And he’s famously a person who believes whatever serves his ego.
His conduct was massively improper either way.
This should be the fundamental take-away from all this. “My client is honestly too stupid and/or crazy to realize they’re violating the law” shouldn’t be a defense for anyone, let alone the freaking president.
Anyone who thinks this argument should be enough for Trump to avoid prison, but does not also think that it should automatically disqualify him from ever holding office again, is just being a lying asshole.
I don’t think that has changed.
Yes, you are being too generous. It’s important to focus on because he said that he wanted votes found for him instead of saying that he wanted all votes counted.
[Malcolm Reynolds]And they never did ask.[/Malcolm Reynolds] Seriously, all they had to do was say “Could you explain what you mean by that, sir?” or “How do you suggest we find votes that don’t exist?” But because they didn’t ask him to go into greater detail about the illegal thing he was openly suggesting he can weasel his way out of it. “I said that many because that’s where it shows that I won. Of course, there are many, many thousands more votes after that but we can stop counting once we’ve proven that I won.”
This isn’t really accurate. A key thrust of the call was “we all know I won by a mile, and it’s completely unfair on the people of Georgia that a terrible election fraud has been committed against them”. Of course there are deeply self serving comments as well, but he’s adamant that the reason the result needed to be changed is because as it stood it did not reflect the true votes, not because that’s the outcome he wants.
You underestimate both Raffensperger and Trump.
As a lawyer, you avoid if possible asking an opposing party a question that will give them a chance to give a self-serving answer.
Read the whole transcript. Trump is an extremely experienced shady operator. If he had been asked a direct question as you propose, he would have spotted the trap a mile off. And even if he didn’t, his lawyers in the same room as him would have interjected. He would have answered such a direct question with a version of precisely what he said in the hour long call over and over - “I’m just saying that there was huge fraud etc against me in this election, I actually won by hundreds of thousands of votes, all I’m saying is you need to look into it more closely and if you do you will find far more than the 11,000 or so votes that will change the result”.
And Raffensperger and team would have thereby given Trump a chance to specifically “explain away” his incriminating innuendo, on the record.
That clown didn’t care if there were really that many votes or not. What he cared about was trying to get the person in charge of running a particular election ro falsify a record and bolster it with false ballots.
For that one line, I’m not sure he meant what everybody says he meant and what all of the news reporters are claiming he meant. Lots of things were wrong with that call and this is the one thing that is always mentioned.
IMHO, what you’re calling the thrust of the call was just a smokescreen. When he said “I just want to find 11,780 votes”, he said the quiet part out loud.
Then Donald’s goons should have gone out and found a shred of fucking evidence before he committed an impeachable offense.
That would imply a base level of competence that the trumpites just don’t possess.
Yeah, that’s the other part of the context you have to understand about this call. It took place about two months after the voting was done. Had there really been hundreds of thousands of votes misplaced, someone in the dozens of audits and lawsuits that were filed would have found something.
Trump was pressuring them to “find” new votes after literally months of failure to do that exact thing, anywhere in the entire country.
What I’ve always found ridiculous in this and other lies is how he “knows” he won. Nobody knows who won an election until they count the votes. Did he personally have access to the ballots to count them and form his conclusion? If so, then he already has the votes he needs. Why ask someone else to find them for you?
Well, maybe that awkward part bout explaining how you got access to private ballots nobody else did, including the election officials who’s job that is. And if you really do have private access then how do we know you yourself didn’t personally add or switch the ballots around?
I think part of this comes from Trump’s background in real estate where the numbers are somewhat fungible and open to negotiation. From his point of view 11,780 votes out of almost 5 million cast is just a rounding error, something that should be easily fudged away.
Asking Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes probably seemed to him like asking his accountant to find another $10,000 worth of deductions, or the appraiser of his property to find an additional $300K in equity. All it involved was taking another look at the numbers and interpreting them little differently.