Georgia Secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (R) shed more light on his infamous phone call with then-president Donald Trump, who begged him to “give him a break” and “recalculate” the vote counts and allocate ballots cast for Biden to his name so he can undo his election loss and said that “God put me in this time that he knew that I would have the courage and the conviction to do the right thing.”
During an interview with The Hill, Raffensperger said that the former president “demonstrated virtually no knowledge of the conduct of modern elections procedures” as he “ticked off a host of debunked and fanciful conspiracy theories he blamed for his electoral defeat.”
The interview with The Hill comes as Raffensperger “details months of mistruths and disinformation perpetuated by the Trump campaign that led up to their conversation during a long and rambling phone call after the election” in a new book titled “Integrity Counts” released Tuesday.
As noted by The Hill, the book includes a roughly 40-page transcript of the call itself, which shows an increasingly agitated Trump grasping at allegations that Raffensperger and his top deputy systematically refute, urging them to “recalculate” the vote count in his favor.
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“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump told Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the general counsel to the secretary of state, according to the transcript.
“This repeated request for votes showed me that President Trump really had no idea how elections work. The secretary of state’s office doesn’t allocate any votes,” Raffensperger writes in an annotation of the call, according to The Hill.
“At the time of the call in January, I didn’t know if he believed what he was saying. I didn’t know if he was trying to push a narrative, or was he just believing stuff that was fed to him?” Raffensperger told The Hill. “As a conservative-with-a-capital-C Republican, I’m disappointed like everyone else is. But the cold hard facts are that President Trump did come up short in the state of Georgia.”
The Hill also reported that “Raffensperger declined to say whether he believes Trump is morally fit to be president. Instead, he said, he is happy he was the one responsible for running Georgia’s elections.”
“I guess you could say God put me in this time that he knew that I would have the courage and the conviction to do the right thing. And I’m very thankful that I did,” he said. “Because it was the right thing to do, because it was based on the facts, it was based on the law, it was based on the Constitution.”
Read The Hill’s report here.
Listen to Trump’s call with Raffensperger below via The Washington Post.
