Trump Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Enough Votes to Overturn Election

Politics & Elections
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I read the amazing transcript of the phone call a while ago and commented on its lunacy already. But I listened to the audio just today, and it adds another dimension to the occasion. Trump starts out making his outrageously false and just plain illogical claims, but at least does so in a calm manner. But as the call proceeds, he starts to get warmed up, and by the end of it he’s become completely unhinged. Comparing any part of this, but especially towards the end, with interviews with a young Trump made decades ago are quite instructive. For a moron, he was surprisingly articulate. All of that is gone; he’s inarticulate, illogical, repetitive, threatening – it’s no wonder that Raffensperger was anxious to get him the hell off the phone, and in retrospect, no wonder that Raffensperger recorded the whole fiasco.

Anyway, the point of this is, I’m just thinking about 2024. I’m inclined to disagree with Mary Trump that he’ll be afraid to run – I think his ego will make it almost inevitable that he’ll try. But I think at this rate of decline, and considering the many crazy stunts he’s likely to pull over the next four years, he’s unlikely to get the nomination, and if he does, he’ll be a basket case by then. And that’s not even considering the many criminal charges he may face. And I don’t think any of the kids are going to have any success in this space – Don Jr. is a complete moron, like his dad but with even less life experience, and Ivanka isn’t much better. I think the whole nepotistic cabal is done.

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Doesn’t the Georgia Secretary of State have to certify under oath that the election results are valid? If President Trump suborned perjury conspiracy to suborn perjury is a crime even if perjury is never committed. In my opinion a felony certainly qualifies as an impeachable offence.

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Alright, let me help you out here:

I say that Trump wants to “invent” votes in the sense he wants Georgian election officials to outright lie and commit fraud on his behalf. Trump doesn’t care if that means changing legitimate votes to votes he finds more pleasing or false ballots or any other conceivable variation. Trump just wants to be declared winner in Georgia and he doesn’t care how that happens, he just wants other people to make it happen for him. I believe Trump wants to win so badly he is willing to attempt to bully and threaten others into committing felonies on his behalf, after which he’ll be happy to throw those people under the bus.

The support for my position is that hour-long phone call where you can hear Trump himself do this in his own voice, at length, and in context. That phone call occurred. It is a fact. What happened on that phone call is also a fact and we do not have to rely on he-said/he-said exchanges.

The election officials in Georgia are far from saints, but at least they have self-interest not to play Trump’s game because they know they’ll be sacrificed to his ego if they do so. Moral fiber? I have no idea, but they care enough about their own skins to follow the law and have the wit to cover their own backsides, which is more than some of the jerks in the Senate are doing.

So no, we very much are NOT in agreement on that.

Trump wants to invalidate the votes of Republicans who split their ticket. He is unwilling to accept that someone might vote for every other Republican BUT Trump.

Trump is NOT interested in rooting out fraud, he’s interested in eliminating the votes for anyone except himself.

That is not the action of a democratic leader. That is the act of a want-to-be dictator.

Trump is an enemy of American democracy.

Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election.

Trump is going to be out of the White House after 12 noon on January 20. He can either walk out on his own, or suffer the indignity of being removed. Those are his only two choices left.

Those who continue to support the lies of Trump are pawns in his game that he will happily sacrifice when it becomes convenient for him to do so. Their loyalty will not be rewarded.

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They’re not “coming to their senses”. They’re just coming after anyone not showing complete devotion to their Dear Leader. It’s the same reason FoxNews is now considered too left-wing and why they claim Barr has been paid off by Dominion to cover up all that voter fraud.

If anything, they’re doubling down.

It’s the old “It’s unfair to prosecute me for murdering my parents because I’m an orphan” game.

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On a certain level, I think there are some Republicans who are willing to resort to cheating because they are so certain that the other side did/does cheat (even if they don’t and they feel they have to cheat in order to have any chance to win at all. It’s like athletes who justify their use of steroids and other illicit performance enhancers with the phrase “but everyone is doing it!”.

It’s beyond the comprehension of these folks that they actually lost a FAIR election.

This is what happens when you start to believe your own propaganda.

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Here’s what happened, folks.

n 2016 trump won MI, WI, and PA by a combined margin barely large enough to fill your average football stadium. Those three states had voted Dem in every election since 1992. trump’s taking those states was a fluke, not a trend. It was only due to the Dems nominating a candidate who was massively unpopular, in her own right. Flip those back and Biden wins. Now, on top of that you’ve got AZ and GA. What happened in those two states? Well, in AZ you had a popular Senate candidate on the Dem side who may have dragged Biden across the finish line in a “reverse coattail” effect and you’ve got trump’s ongoing battle with the ghost of John McCain. Say what you want about McCain, he was plenty popular in his home state and folks there did not take kindly to trump’s continued bad–mouthing of a guy who couldn’t fight back, what with being dead and all. That leaves GA. Chalk that one up to Stacey Abrams who, after that 2018 loss of the Governor’s race followed that old maxim “Don’t get mad, get even.” She organized, registered folks and did old fashioned GOTV stuff. And it worked. Also, trump was doing the same thing as he did with McCain in GA, only with John Lewis. Lewis is revered in the black community and trump’s continued assaults on him, even after death, made it a sure bet that black Georgians would crawl through broken glass to vote for any body else. No fraud required here, folks. I don’t expect trump supporters to believe any of this, having subcontracted their cognitive processes long ago. Just putting out an alternate theory of the case.

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Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I believe that Trump and Repubs at large are super agitated about losing Georgia because the fix has long been in there. Kemp and Raffensberger have done everything they legally can to keep the “wrong” people from voting and, this time, they still couldn’t win. If you’re a GOP strategist, this is very bad news and a very bad trend that is rearing its ugly (for them) head in other states as well.

I’ve asked this rhetorical question before: at what point do conservatives begin believing that encouraging voter participation will win them more votes than suppression? It’s not just people in inner cities who are justifiably suspicious of the GOP; it’s also people like me see who are outraged by the fundamental unfairness and hostility of their actions. Base Trump voters may believe the shit they’re fed daily by Fox, that millions of “illegal” voters keep denying them their place in power but the newest generations of voters who will soon dominate US elections aren’t buying it.

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Excellent question. Presumably the strong rightward shift in the Rio Grande Valley and parts of southern Florida suggest avenues to attract new voters; also pockets of Iowa and Ohio that remained stubbornly Trumpian.

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What limits exist outside the courtroom? Why are they permitted to grandstand publicly? I’m not saying the public standard should equal the courtroom standard. But there should be some standards.

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Idk, a small, churlish part of me would like to see his legacy to be that he’s the only president to be impeached twice, even if it leads to nothing.

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I listened to the call last night and read along with the transcript. Among all the other BS, one thing that struck me was that Trump didn’t really want to talk about Dominion :

Trump: Well, Brad. 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. And just to, you know, maybe put a little different spin on what Mark is saying, Mark Meadows, uh, yeah we’d like to go further, but we don’t really need to. We have all the votes we need.

Later, Mitchell says, "And it doesn’t even, and as I, as the president said, we haven’t even gotten into the Dominion issue. That’s not part of our case. It’s not part of our, we just didn’t feel as though we had any way to be able to develop —

And Trump cuts her off, “No, we do have a way but I don’t want to get into it.” Sure, you have a way.

They know Dominion allegations will go nowhere. They know court challenges will go nowhere. Trumps tiny hands can’t quite get a grip on the straws he’s grasping at.

I think my favorite part was where Meadows tried to put words into Germany’s mouth and was promptly shot down.

Meadows: Mr. President. This is Mark. It sounds like we’ve got two different sides agreeing that we can look at these areas and I assume that we can do that within the next 24 to 48 hours to go ahead and get that reconciled so that we can look at the two claims and making sure that we get the access to the secretary of state’s data to either validate or invalidate the claims that have been made. Is that correct?

Germany: No, that’s not what I said. I’m happy to have our lawyers sit down with Kurt and the lawyers on that side and explain to my him, here’s, based on what we’ve looked at so far, here’s how we know this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.

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I believe that may be because Dominion has shown that it will not be bullied, and if anyone talks bullshit smack about them, they will sue their ass into oblivion. Not just threaten to sue them… Actually take the defamation spewing turds to court and bankrupt them.

Trump got this message loud and clear.

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There are. Case in point:

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I’ve been deeply enjoying the discomfiture of Raffensperger and Kemp. They aren’t heroes and they aren’t honorable men. They’re craven enablers that are getting exactly what they deserve.

They’ve been around the whole time. They watched Trump try to intimidate James Comey, then fire, trash and attempt to prosecute him. They watched Trump do the same thing to Andrew McCabe. They witnessed his reputational attacks on Bob Mueller and his team of highly seasoned law enforcement officer - attacks that left half the American public thinking that the law enforcement agencies were the real criminals.
They watched Trump try to intimidate and extort the President of Ukraine, and through their silence, supported the contention that the civil employees that exposed the scheme were the real traitors and criminals.

They seemed perfectly fine with all this and backed Trump 1000% when all this happened, even putting Trump and his ego above the health and welfare of the citizens of their state by backing his COVID non-response. And they continued to support him. They voted for him.

And now Trump’s coming for them. Good. They deserve it. I feel bad that their families are being threatened, and I don’t want them to actually get killed or injured, but I’m glad they are scared. I want them to be terrified. I want them to feel it.

Because they didn’t care when Comey went through this. They didn’t care when McCabe went through it. They didn’t care when Marie Yovanavich, Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill went through this. They were happy to support and enable extortion when they weren’t the victims. They were perfectly OK with death threats aimed at people that oppose Trump until it happened to them.
I don’t wish them harm, but I’m pretty cool with the idea of them needing to drain their retirement accounts to pay for the level of private security they now require. I like watching the leopards eat their faces.

I also don’t think the Georgia state officials would’ve had any compunction about cheating to swing Georgia to Trump if there had been any possible way to do so. The real reason they aren’t announcing that Trump really won Georgia is that they can’t. There’s no cover, no possible path for ginning up fake results. I’m sure they would’ve if they could’ve .

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No time soon.

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I’m curious how many people split tickets, and how many people only voted in the Presidential election. I’ve met people who vote, but only vote for President.

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The SoS said that if Trump hadn’t tweeted lies about the call, he wouldn’t have released the recording. He would have covered up Trump’s blatant attempt at voter fraud.

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Awesome post.

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