The United States' outgoing president Donald Trump's futile efforts to overturn the November 2020 election result proved to be a boomerang and had a disastrous effect on himself after he was heard in a leaked audio pressurizing election officials in Georgia state, where he lost with a narrow margin, to "find" him enough votes to captalize on his rival Joe Biden's electoral victory.
In the secretly taped conversation, first reported by The Washington Post, Trump was heard mostly spending the hour-long conversation angrily alleging voting fraud, ballot destruction and other charges, while Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rejected pressure to further investigate the election in which there has been no evidence of widespread fraud.
Trump's loss is a stunning upset
The Georgia General Assembly has been controlled by the Republicans since 2004. They have majorities over the Democrats in both the Senate and House of Representatives by margins of 35 to 21 and 105 to 75 respectively as of 2019. Now, Trump's loss in the Southern state, along with other swing states that put Biden easily across the finishing line in electoral votes, is a stunning upset.
According to votes tallied by NBC News in last November, Trump was only able to pick up about 1,300 votes in the recount, which left Biden with a margin just over 12,000 votes.
In the leaked recording of a phone call with Raffensperger, and other Republican officials, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump said, "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."
The leaked audio also revealed threats by the president that Raffensperger and another Georgia official could face "a big risk" in case they failed to pursue his request.
Trump's isn't gonna give up easily
"The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry," Trump told Raffensperger in the conversation, adding, "And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated."
Raffensperger said : "Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong."
"There's no way I lost Georgia," Trump said.
"There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes." For evidence, Trump further offered conspiracy theories and numbers that have not withstood scrutiny. At one point during the conversation, he also cited the size of his election rallies, which attracted large number of supporters, to suggest he could not have lost.
Trump's final chapter in his attempts to cling to power
Raffensperger and all other Republican officials in Georgia have withstood weeks of unrelenting pressure from Trump and his lawyers to change the election outcome. The audits and recounts, including one by hand, bore out the initial result, but Trump was not giving up.
In more than 60 lawsuits those were filled to challenge the election results in a large number of states, the Trump campaign has lost almost all the cases including two in the Supreme Court, where a third of the justices were the president's appointees.
The White House has currently declined to comment on the audio leaks.
Journalist Carl Bernstein of the Watergate fame is back in news on CNN saying that the leaked tapes of Donald Trump trying to pressure Georgia's secretary of state to overturn the president's election defeat are "far worse" than what occurred in the Watergate scandal.
"It's not déjà vu. This was something far worse than occurred in Watergate," Bernstein told CNN. "We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time in this one person," he added.
"This is the ultimate smoking gun tape. It is the tape with the evidence of what this president is willing to do to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally try to instigate a coup," said Bernstein, adding that the evidence is enough to call for an impeachment and seek the president's immediate resignation.
