"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."
"So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it's not fair to take it away from us like this."
"And it's going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you're going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don't want to find answers."
— Donald Trump, speaking to the Georgia secretary of state, in a phone call that was taped and released to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Washington Post.
Listen here.
From Amy Gardner's report for the Washington Post:
President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to "find" enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking "a big risk."
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office's general counsel rejected Trump's assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden's 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
(…) Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a "child" and "either dishonest or incompetent" for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a "schmuck" for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.
