Brad Raffensperger is an American businessman, civil engineer and politician who served as Secretary of State in Georgia since 2019 He was member of the Republican Party and previously served as a Republican representative in in the Georgia House of Representatives for District 50.
He became famous around the world when President Donald Trump had lost the election to Joe Biden but could not bear the thought of giving up the presidency. As a result, Trump repeatedly made false claims about election fraud on the part of the Democrats and their allies and launched an unsuccessful campaign to overturn election results in many states. He launched more than 60 suits and all but one were lost except for a very minor one that really had little significance.
As part of this campaign, Trump harassed Raffensperger with numerous telephone calls until he finally agreed to talk to the President on the telephone on January 2, 2021 less than a month before the inauguration. Fortunately, he took precautions and recorded the conversation. In that call, sounding like a Mafia Don, President Don tried to get Raffensperger to change the election results by finding more votes for him than had been counted. This is what he said in that telephone call: “”What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” He never won the race of course as his own Republican election officials showed him over and over again. His own Attorney General, Bill Barr also confirmed this.
Heroically, Raffensperger refused to do so, and said the outgoing president’s claims were based on falsehoods.
First, the Trump team was obviously desperate to have that telephone conversation. In all 18 telephone calls and texts made by the president’s office to Raffensperger were made including from himself and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. They wanted to talk to Raffensperger badly. And finally, on January 2, 2020, 4 days before the events of January 6th they got that call. As Schiff said, “they were quite persistent.”
Next, president Trump kept pushing the false claim that he had won the state of Georgia, which the election officials had carefully and methodically determined was just not true. None of them had ever received the evidence to the contrary that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani had promised. That evidence never did come.
Trump then menacingly reminded Raffensperger that the people of Georgia were angry because he had won by hundreds of thousands of votes. Of course, they were angry not because Trump had those votes, but because Trump was able to persuade his followers, without any evidence, that this false claim was true. It was not true. The reminder though was important. It was a subtle way of telling Raffensperger that he was in a dangerous position. The previous year had shown many examples of what happened when Trump unleashed his followers onto state officials for failing to believe his lies. The Governor of Michigan was nearly kidnapped by a pack of deadly Trumpsters. In Arizona and Georgia and other places those brave election officials were threatened with death. Taking the ethically right position as Raffensperger had done was either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. Raffensperger was not stupid. He was a brave an honourable man; everything the president was not.
Trump had told a state of Georgia official, Miss Frances Watson, that she would be praised if she found the right answer. Secretary of State Raffensperger stated Trump did not win by hundreds of thousands of votes. He didn’t win at all.
Trump was engaged in pure intimidation And intimidation from the most powerful man in the world is a very big deal. The rest of us can only guess how hard it would be to resist such intimidation. Yet it is still shocking to me that some honourable state officials, many of them Republicans, had the courage to resist such pressure. The president of the United States said to Frances Watson that he would be very grateful for “whatever you can do.” This is how Mafia dons work. President Dons should do better. We expect more from presidents.
When Trump spoke to Raffensperger the election in Georgia had already been certified and Trump had been told repeatedly by Georgia and federal officials that his claims of voter fraud were entirely unsubstantiated and that his conspiracy theories about voter fraud in Georgia were bogus. Yet Trump persisted in pressuring Raffensperger to find the votes he needed to win despite the lack of evidence of voter fraud. That call lasted 67 minutes.
Even though the conspiracy theory of suitcases of ballots had been dismissed by Gabriel Sterling and William Barr, Trump insisted on bringing them up again. Trump said, “the minimum it was, was 18,000 ballots. All for Biden.” Trump did not explain how he purported to know they were all for Biden. There were no such illegal ballots in any event, but how did Trump or his team know the votes were all for Biden?
Over and over again, Trump thinks that just because he says something it must be true. That is the classic stance of the bully. I can’t possibly be wrong. Don’t ask for evidence. Just believe me because I said it.
These were allegations that the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the office of the Secretary of State for Georgia, which Raffensperger headed, had dismissed as false and Trump knew they had rejected his claims about them.
Raffensperger confirmed that all these bodies had declared them false. As he said,
“Even more importantly, when Bjay Pak resigned as US Attorney of the northern district of Georgia, Trump appointed as acting District Attorney of the northern district , Bobby Christine. And Bobby Christine looked at that he was quoted in the AJC that he found nothing. And he dismissed that case…”
Again his own appointees found no fraud.
Yet Trump believed, as a bully would believe, that even though all these officials dismissed the conspiracy theory Trump promulgated, that he expected Raffensperger to act on the basis of it in the face of all these dismissals merely because Trump said Raffensperger should do that, even though neither Trump nor Giuliani ever provided any evidence for their claims. When the Mafia Don speaks, he expects everyone else to believe him no matter who has debunked the claim and no matter how little evidence there is to support his claims.
Gabriel Sterling confirmed that there were not suitcases of illegal ballots as Trump constantly alleged, “they were standard ballot carriers that allow seals to be put on them so they are tamper proof.” There was nothing shady or nefarious about them contrary to what Trump and Giuliani continued to suggest. The ballots were exactly where they belonged in tamper proof carriers. A monitor from the Department of Justice counted how many votes had been counted on each machine and made a note about that.
In the telephone call Trump said, “They dropped a lot of votes in there late at night, you know that Brad.’ Because Trump said so it must be true, right? Wrong. This was not true. As Raffensperger said at the hearing,
“No, I believe the president was referring to some of the counties when they would upload the ballots all had been accepted. They had to be accepted by state law by 7 p.m. So there were no additional ballots accepted after 7 p.m.”
Once again, the president was not telling the truth on the telephone call. The statements Trump had been making to the contrary over and over again on social media and other media were not true. But these lies were travelling fast, as lies often do. Many people believed the lies because the president told them.
On that telephone call with Raffensperger, Trump also brought the second conspiracy theory:
“So dead people voted. And the number is close to 5,000 people. They went to obituaries, they went to all sort of methods to come up with an accurate number. And at a minimum that’s close to 5,000 voters.”
At the hearing Raffensperger was asked if they had investigated this second conspiracy as well, and he confirmed that his office had done that. As Raffensperger said,
“That is not accurate. Actually, in their law suit they alleged 10,315 dead people voted. We found 2 dead people who had voted when we reported on January 6th. Subsequent to that we found 2 more. That is 1, 2, 3, 4 not 4000, a total of 4. Not 10,000 not 5,000.”
So in Georgia the Trump legal team missed the mark by 10, 311 votes.