By Aiyeku Timothy
Outgoing US President Donald Trump reportedly called and threatened Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to find 11,780 votes in another bid to stop Joe Biden’s victory.
A tape of the “extraordinary” conversation, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter, where he had an hour-long phone call on Saturday with the Georgia Secretary was leaked.
A senior Biden adviser, Bob Bauer, who also revealed the phone call conversation, said “We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”
Trump in the reported phone call said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
He insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
When exposed, Trump admitted by saying “The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
Meanwhile, election results proved that Trump did not win Georgia, as they went Democratic for the first time since 1992. The result has also been certified.
In his reaction, Ohio State law professor, Edward B Foley, said the call was “‘inappropriate and contemptible’ and should prompt moral outrage”. In an email to the Guardian, University of Richmond law Professor, Carl Tobias, said Trump might be “in legal jeopardy after Biden is inaugurated”.
“For example, if the justice department or US attorneys believe that Trump violated federal law or if local prosecutors in states, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump may have engaged in similar behaviour with state or local election officials, believe that Trump violated state election laws, the federal or state prosecutors could file suit against Trump.”
However, Biden’s electoral college victory will be upheld by Congress on Wednesday and the Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January as Trump will be without any choice than to leave the White House.
