“The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me,” Trump told Frances Watson, the chief investigator for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, according to the recording. “They know
I won, won by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
He added,
“When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.” Later on the call, he said,
“You have the most important job in the country right now.”
He also said,
“whatever you can do, Frances, it would be — it’s a great thing. It’s an important thing for the country. So important. You’ve no idea. So important. And I very much appreciate it.”
. . . .
At the time Trump called her, Watson was leading an audit of mail ballot signatures in Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta. Legal experts have said the president’s outreach — and
another call he placed directly to Raffensperger on Jan. 2 — may have amounted to obstruction of a criminal investigation.
On the call with Watson, Trump urged her to check the envelope signatures against older signatures on file rather than a current file — an apparent attempt to inflate the numbers of nonmatching signatures.
In Georgia and Florida in 2018, thousands of eligible voters saw their ballots rejected because officials checked their signatures against one on file that was older, and the voters’ signatures had evolved in the intervening time.
“I hope you’re going back two years as opposed to just checking, you know, one against the other because that would just be sort of a signature check that didn’t mean anything,” Trump said.
“But if you go back two years, and if you can get to Fulton, you’re going to find things that are going to be unbelievable, the dishonesty that we’ve heard from, just good sources, really good sources.”
“But Fulton is the mother lode, you know, as the expression goes. Fulton County,” he added.
Trump also urged Watson to continue investigating past the Christmas holiday “because, you know, we have the date, which is a very important date” — an apparent reference to Jan. 6, the day a joint session of Congress was scheduled to formalize the electoral college results.
Trump was fixated on that date as a last opportunity to overturn the election results, encouraging thousands of his supporters to descend on Washington and protest the vote. The ensuing riot at the U.S. Capitol left five people dead, including one police officer. Dozens of officers were injured. In the aftermath of the violence, Congress formally recognized President Biden’s win that night.
