- Georgia’s top election official, Gabriel Sterling, said Rudy Giuliani had “lied” by presenting a fraudulently edited video as evidence of election fraud.
- In a 60-minute interview, Sterling denied Giuliani’s allegations of illegal ballot papers, saying the president’s lawyer only showed a misleading clip to state senators in Georgia, despite having access to the full video.
- Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also appeared in ’60 Minutes, ‘said Giuliani “knows that what he said was not true.”
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A top Georgia election official said Rudy Giuliani had ‘lied’ about election fraud claims by presenting a fraudulently edited video as evidence, despite access to the full footage.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling made the remarks in a ’60-minute ‘interview broadcast on Sunday, in which he described President Donald Trump’s allegations of voter fraud as’ fantastic, unreasonable’ and ‘missing’. factual reality. ‘
Sterling, a Republican and Trump voter, told interviewer Scott Pelley that Giuliani had submitted a selectively edited video to state actors in Georgia as evidence. In a clip shown on ’60 Minutes’ by Giulani presenting the video, he calls it a ‘powerful smoking gun’.
The video of Giuliani, which was also aired in national Trump campaign ads, claims to show cases of ballots being removed from under a table and ‘secretly added’.
However, Sterling said the full video shows a different story.
—60 minutes (@ 60 minutes) 11 January 2021
He said when the election officials announced that they had finished counting the day, uncounted ballot papers were placed in safe, toddler-proof cases and stored under the table. Shortly afterwards, officials were told they had to keep counting through the night.
At that point, the safe cases of countless ballot papers were brought under the table to proceed with the count.
Sterling said the president’s team always had access to the full video, but Giuliani only submitted the part of the state senators showing that matters are being pulled out from under the table.
“Rudy Giuliani looked them in the eye and lied,” he said.
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“From my point of view, they have deliberately misled the statesmen, the people of Georgia and the people of the United States to continue this conspiracy theory and keep the disinformation going, which has caused this environment that we see us today,” said Sterling.
Giulani did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Trump and his allies have reiterated unfounded allegations of widespread voter and election fraud since the president lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. However, none of the claims were upheld in court, and the justice department said it found no evidence of widespread fraud.
The conviction of some of the president’s supporters that the election was fraudulent fueled the deadly siege on the American Capitol last week, where many of the rioters rumbled and signs with the words “Stop the theft!”
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, also appeared on ’60 Minutes’, reflecting Sterling’s allegations, saying Giuliani ‘knows that what he said was not true.’
“But our state senate did not ask us to get in there so we could refute what they said,” he said of the Republican legislature. “And it was actually left as the gospel truth, and it was not either. It was fabricated.”
Earlier this month, in a leaked telephone conversation between Raffensperger and the White House, Trump repeated unsubstantiated allegations about the election and urged the Secretary of State to “find” him enough votes to beat Biden.
The day after the call was leaked, Sterling also dismissed the president’s claims, which he said made him ‘scream’ because they were so dishonest.