In an extraordinary telephone conversation with the Secretary of State of Georgia, President Donald Trump put forward a dizzying series of fuzzy accounting and utterly false allegations in order to reverse his electoral defeat and draw up a series of votes that he said should count in his favor. word.
In the hour-long conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggested that the Republican “find” enough votes to give Trump the victory.
The Associated Press got the full audio of Trump’s conversation with officials in Georgia from a person on the call. The AP does not publish the full audio in accordance with its policy of not reinforcing information and unproven allegations.
A look at Trump’s claims on the call and how it compares to reality:
TRUMP: “If we can skip some of the numbers, I think it’s clear we won, we won very substantially in Georgia.”
THE FACTS: No, Trump lost Georgia in an election that certified the state for Democrat Joe Biden. Republican election officials confirmed that the election was conducted and counted fairly.
With the ballots counted three times, including once by hand, Georgia’s certified totals show that Trump lost to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million votes. Raffensperger confirmed the total with officials saying they found no evidence that Trump won.
No credible claims of fraud or systemic errors were made. Judges have rejected legal challenges to the outcome, although at least one is still pending in the state court.
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TRUMP: “People should be happy to have an accurate score … We have other states that I believe will return to us soon.”
THE FACTS: No result of the election result is in prospect, in Georgia or other states.
Biden defeated Trump by about 7 million popular votes nationwide and by a score of 306-232 in Electoral College, gaining a victory in other key states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona.
Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, has found no evidence of widespread election fraud. Trump’s allegations of massive vote-rigging were rejected by a succession of judges and refuted by state election officials and an arm of his own government’s Department of Homeland Security.
A group of Senate Republicans, led by Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, say they plan to object to the outcome of the election when Congress convenes Wednesday to compare Biden’s victory over Electoral College over Trump.
The objections will force votes in the House as well as in the Senate, but are not expected to prevail.
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TRUMP: “We mysteriously dropped between 250 (thousand) and 300,000 votes, many of which have to do with Fulton County, which has not been reviewed.”
THE FACTS: There is nothing mysterious or suspicious about it. He describes a legitimate process of counting votes, not a sudden surge of misunderstanding.
It appears that Trump is referring to a large number of votes that were put on the table on Wednesday morning after election day and later. The arrival of the votes was not mysterious, but expected, because many of Georgia’s 159 provinces had large stacks of ballots that had to be counted after the closing of the ballot boxes and the personal votes.
Indeed, in the days before the election, news organizations and officials warned that the results were likely to come just as they were: votes counted faster in person were likely to benefit the president, who spent. months that warned his supporters to vote by email and to vote in person early or on election day.
And ballots, which take longer to count as they have to be removed from envelopes and verified before being counted, will benefit Biden. States tend to count ballots at the end of the process.
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TRUMP: “We think … if there’s a real signature in Fulton County, you’ll find at least a few hundred thousand forged signatures.”
THE FACTS: It has no basis in reality.
It would be impossible for anyone to falsify hundreds of thousands of signatures on ballot papers in Fulton County, as there were only about 147,000 ballot papers in Georgia’s most populous province, of which about 116,000 would go to Biden.
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TRUMP, citing investigations into his baseless allegations of voter fraud: “You have your never-trumper American lawyer there.”
THE FACTS: The American lawyer in Atlanta is actually a Trump nominee. Byung J. “BJay” Pak is a longtime Republican who also served in the House of Representatives from Georgia from 2011 to 2017. He was nominated by Trump to become the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in 2017. In the announcing his nomination, the White House said that Pak and five other nominees for the U.S. Attorney’s Office “share the president’s vision for ‘Making America Safe Again.’ “Pak also previously worked as an American lawyer.
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TRUMP, referring to 18,000 “suspicious” voices: “The band that was shown around the world … they said very clearly that there is a big water pipe. Everyone fled the area and then they came back … there were no Republican voters … and there was no law enforcement … It was packed with votes. They were not in an official constituency, but in suitcases or suitcases. … The minimum number it could be … was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden. ‘
THE FACTS: This is a serious distortion of what really happened.
State and Fulton County election officials say the surveillance video that Trump is referring to does not show improper behavior, but normal voice processing that does not use suitcases, but ballot boxes on wheels. Officials said the entire video showed the same workers had earlier packed the ballot boxes with valid, uncounted ballot papers.
Republicans argued that their observers were told to leave the Fulton County polling station, but election officials said they actually left after confusion that arose because election workers thought they were ready for the night.
According to state and provincial officials, an independent monitor and an investigator actually oversaw the number of votes. Trump also refers to a false confession attributed to a woman who was allegedly involved in the incident that was posted on social media.
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TRUMP: “In other states we think we’ve found huge corruption with Dominion machines, but we’ll have to see it.”
THE FACTS: No “huge corruption” was found.
There is “no evidence that any voting system removed or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way endangered,” the federal agency, which oversees electoral security, said in a statement compiled by officials of the state and electoral industry.
Associated Press authors Eric Tucker and Mark Sherman contributed to this report.