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Two Democratic members of Congress asked the FBI to open an “immediate criminal investigation” after Donald Trump was heard pleading with an election official to “find” him a few more votes in Georgia.
Representatives Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice have written to FBI Director Christopher Wray, saying they “believe that Donald Trump participated in the solicitation or conspiracy to commit a series of electoral crimes.”
In a recording obtained by US media, the outgoing president of the United States can be heard claiming that there was “no way” lost in the southern state.
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Harris accuses Trump of ‘abuse of power’
During the hour-long call, Trump asks for 11,780 votes, one more than he lost in Georgia, to be discovered somehow.
Lieu and Rice cite a series of legal codes that claim Trump may be violating.
One of them describes someone trying “to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartial electoral process.”
The couple tell Wray: “The evidence of Trump’s electoral fraud is now in the light of day. The prima facie elements of the previous crimes have been met.”
The man Trump spoke to on Saturday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said he was reluctant to take the call.
“I never thought it was appropriate to speak to the president, but he declined. I guess he got his staff to push us, they wanted a call,” Raffensperger told ABC News on Monday.
“He (Trump) spoke the most, we listened to most of it,” added Raffensperger, a Republican.
“The data he has is just wrong. He had hundreds and hundreds of people who said they were dead who voted. We found two. That’s one example of his wrong data.”
During the call, Trump could be heard mentioning a number of debunked conspiracy theories.
The president even suggested that Raffensperger could be held criminally liable if he refused to discover that thousands of ballots had been illegally destroyed in Fulton County.
There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims of “broken ballots” in the county.
Brad Raffensperger says the president’s data is ‘just wrong’
In another development, Senator Tom Cotton has refused to join a campaign started by nearly a dozen other Republicans in the Senate to challenge Joe Biden’s victory.
Senator Cotton said such a move was outside the power of Congress and “would set unwise precedents.”
