I know, he wasn’t aiming to create a trap as much as to insure himself against Trump claiming “That conversation never happened,” but it seems to me that the ambiguities that Trump’s defense are probably going to cite could have been reduced, if not eliminated, if Raffensberger had phrased things differently.
For example, I’d like to know how Trump would have responded to “Mr. President, what precisely would have me do that I haven’t done with the votes in Georgia?”
And
“Can you send me a memo detailing the specific steps you would like my team to take? I believe, Mr. President, that we’ve already checked and doublechecked all the data you’re requesting, and it would be a waste of our resources to keep rechecking these things over and over again after were satisfied with the results, but if you send me a memo, I will personally see if there’s anything on there that I need to review again.”
Or
“How exactly do you mean ‘find you 11,780 votes,’ sir? Where would you suggest I look for these votes? We’ve already looked several times, and we’re out of places to find any discrepancies at all.”
From my readings of the transcripts, Raffensberger never really pressed Trump as hard as he might have, in retrospect, to specify the illegal acts he was asking him to perform.
I am no expert, but could it also be that lack of specificity is also a boon to prosecution?
Like, if Trump was asked “what exactly should I do,” and Trump said, “I’m not telling you to do anything, just find the votes,” we’d be in the same position, but the defense would have a simple piece of evidence that Trump really didn’t ask Raffensberger to do anything illegal.
Almost certainly. Trump isn’t a leader, Trump is a boss. Leaders are expected to have a plan, and to make it clear how to follow that plan.
A Boss just tells you what he wants, and he wants you to go and do it, and not bother him with the details. Details are boring, and risky. If you go out and do something illegal in order to get the job done, the Boss can claim, “I never told him to kill those orphans! I just told him I wanted that orphanage empty by the end of the week!”
But Raffensberger wasn’t Trump’s subordinate. He was in an antagonistic position to Trump at that point, and by playing stupid, he had a way to put the screws to Trump. “I don’t understand you, Mr. President. Where do you think these 11,780 votes might be hiding? I can’t act unless I understand where you think I should look that I haven’t already looked many times.”
Also, Trump doesn’t understand that. This is the guy who lamented the fact that US citizens don’t display absolute loyalty and obedience to the president, like they do in those authoritarian countries. He thinks he is The Boss of America, and can’t understand people who don’t agree.
I doubt it. He’s got 70 years of experience being both unreasonably demanding and deliberately vague about the illegal parts. It’s skill like any other and trump is demonstrably good at it.
The idea that he feels any obligation to answer the question asked in a reasonable and forthright manner is simply willfully naive. He has treated every interview and every interviewer for decades the same way: Questions aren’t for answering; they are simply opportunities to talk and say what trump wants to say to acheive the goal trump wants to achieve for himself.
You’ve asked a number of questions like this or made statements like this in other trumply threads. As if somehow when a questioner asks in the correct fashion, all of trump’s psychological foibles and defense mechanisms fall away and he’d spontaneously answer like a Vulcan: unable to lie and unable to be illogical or incomlete. With no disrespect, that seems to be a significant blind spot in how you understand the guy.
I was considering that he should have told Trump that finding the votes would cost $250,000.00, but that would indeed be entrapment. The guy probably just wanted to get of the phone as quickly as possible.
This is not the correct vocabulary. To “entrap” someone is to induce or trick someone into committing a crime that they otherwise would have been unlikely to commit.
Not at all. There’s a big difference between him evading the questions of a reporter who wants something from him, and evading the questions of someone he wants something from.
In the first instance, he will pussyfoot all day and give nothing away that he doesn’t want to give.
But in the second, he is willing to go around and around with Raffensberger, offering him reasons and incentives and ways to re-examine the matter until he gets Raffensberger to agree (which will be “never” but it doesn’t mean he’s going to give up,) He’s like a stubborn child in this way–when he wants something from you, he won’t accept “No” as a valid answer. He’ll keep asking over and over, which is why I think in this instance he’s easy to trick into saying something more incriminating than what he did say to Raffensberger.
I don’t think we need Trump to have elaborated on the votes, because we have him saying this: ‘Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.’
He’s telling Raffensberger to make a false statement. He’s not saying, ‘Why not say…?’ or ‘You could say…’ He’s telling Raffensberger to say the election was corrupt.
And of course I’m aware that Raffensberger was not motivated to entrap Trump. He basically wanted to get off the phone without telling POTUS to go pound sand up his ass. But there were points in that conversation that seemed ripe for him to get Trump to make specific incriminating statements which Raffensberger bypassed.
But that’s exactly it. We can listen to him do just this, for an hour, on that phone call. He spent an hour just repeating the same thing over and over again, making no positive suggestions as to how to accomplish the task he was setting. Why do you think asking him a direct question will produce any better response?
R: “Mr. president, what exactly do you want me to do?”
T: “I want you to say, 'hey, if in fact, President Trump is right about that, then he wins the state of Georgia”. Why wouldn’t you want to say that?"
R: “But I can’t say that if you didn’t get the votes. What exactly do you want me to do about that?”
T: “Come on, I know I got the votes, you know I got the votes, I got all the votes in Texas, and Ohio, and Florida, you know I got votes in Georgia, so many votes, you just need to say, ‘Trump got the votes’.”
Wash rinse repeat until R gives up trying. Trump can waffle better than the Eggo factory.
“Please don’t tell me what I know, Mr. President. I do not know that you have the votes–if I did, I would have said so publicly. What I know is that we’ve counted and recounted more times than I thought necessary and we still end up with the same results. So unless you have specific requests for us to look in places that we haven’t looked, I’m sticking firmly to the results we have.”
Raffensperger: Well, I listened to what the President has just said. President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. Um, we don’t agree that you have won. And we don’t — I didn’t agree about the 200,000 number that you’d mentioned. And I can go through that point by point.
Raffensperger: Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen and they were surprised.
But they — I guess there was a person Mr. Braynard who came to these meetings and presented data and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. So that’s wrong. There were two.
Raffensperger: You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context. The next day we brought in WSB-TV and we let them show, see the full run of tape and what you’ll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected by, you know —
Raffensperger: Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.
Raffensperger: We believe that we do have an accurate election.
Trump: No, no you don’t. No, no you don’t. You don’t have. Not even close. You’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes. And just on the small numbers, you’re off on these numbers and these numbers can’t be just — well, why wont? — Okay. So you sent us into Cobb County for signature verification, right? You sent us into Cobb County, which we didn’t want to go into. And you said it would be open to the public. And we could have our - So we had our experts there they weren’t allowed into the room. But we didn’t want Cobb County. We wanted Fulton County. And you wouldn’t give it to us. Now, why aren’t we doing signature — and why can’t it be open to the public?
And why can’t we have professionals do it instead of rank amateurs who will never find anything and don’t want to find anything? They don’t want to find, you know, they don’t want to find anything. Someday you’ll tell me the reason why, because I don’t understand your reasoning, but someday you’ll tell me the reason why. But why don’t you want to find?
I suppose I could cut and paste even more of that, but really. Raffensperger was repeatedly unequivocal that Trump lost, that the election was legitimate, and that Trump’s claims lacked any support. And none of that mattered. Trump just kept cutting him off, talking over him, and repeating the same litanies of lies. Why would tagging on a few “What do you want me to do?” lines make any appreciable difference?