Last week, we learned that Trump spent over an hour on the phone trying to strongarm Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into trying to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s lead there. That tape proved not just beyond reasonable doubt, but beyond ALL doubt that “the steal” was actually being perpetrated by Trump.
Well, earlier this afternoon, The Washington Post reported that this wasn’t the first time Trump subjected a Georgia elections official to a mob-style shakedown. It turns out Trump called Georgia’s top election investigator on December 23, two days before Christmas, and urged him to join the effort to “stop the steal.”
President Trump urged Georgia’s lead elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a lengthy December phone call, saying the official would be a “national hero,” according to an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.
Trump placed the call to the investigations chief for the Georgia secretary of state’s office shortly before Christmas — while the individual was leading an inquiry into allegations of ballot fraud in Cobb County, in the suburbs of Atlanta, according to people familiar with the episode.
The call came a week before the now-infamous January 2 call to Raffensperger. The December call came shortly after Raffensperger’s office launched an investigation into reports of signature discrepancies with mail-in ballots in Cobb. Ultimately, state officials could find no evidence of wrongdoing. Out of 15,000 ballots, they found a total of—drum roll, please—TWO nonmatching signatures.
Raffensperger briefly mentioned the call in an interview with “Good Morning America” on Monday, but this is the first time we’ve gotten more details. According to the source, Trump took a tone with the investigator that he would later take with his boss, Raffensperger—“meandering from flattery to frustration and back again.”
Legal experts believe that if Trump tried to intervene in this investigation, he almost certainly committed a crime. Former Watergate investigator Nick Akerman, for instance, said that “any way you cut it,” Trump almost certainly committed obstruction of justice. The question, though, is proving it.
Robert James, a former prosecutor in DeKalb County, Ga., said that proving obstruction would hinge on what Trump said and the tone he used, as well as whether the president’s intentions were clear.
Without the audio of the call, it would be more difficult to prove wrongdoing, he said. The later call with Raffensperger is more damning, he said, because of the power of the audio that was made public.
“He says, ‘Go find me some votes.’ That can clearly be interpreted as asking someone to break the law,” James said.
Even without the audio, the fact Trump was twisting arms before calling Raffensperger is yet more proof that he, not the Democrats, was attempting to steal the election. And that is indisputably a high crime.
This is even more reason that even if the effort to impeach him fails, Trump is going to leave office with legal trouble hanging over him like a sword of Damocles.