so now to the man at the center of the
georgia runoffs and the other side of
that leaked phone conversation with
president trump
georgia's secretary of state brad
raffensberger uh sir thank you very much
for being here
good to have you with us today thank you
martha
so let's start with a couple of the
things that just came up in in john
roberts reporting there
um he said that the president trump's
lawyer
said that they were very surprised that
you all
allowed this to get out there or put it
out there you can tell me how you want
to characterize that
he said it was a discussion to uh have a
settlement agreement
on two outstanding lawsuits and that
they would be very surprised that you
would uh make those public
that it was a private conversation that
it was privileged what do you say to
that
well it wasn't privileged the we were
just told that the president wanted to
have a conversation i knew it was
about november's results perhaps it was
about uh the runoff that we're having
tomorrow
but there was no specific agenda that
president trump wanted to have a
conversation with me but since it was
ongoing in litigation
i wanted to make sure i had my general
counsel there so he could answer any
questions or
just make sure that we didn't you know
harm any of our
legal interests because we believe that
their
lawsuits have no standing in fact we
think that
if it proceeds to a trial that we'll win
so i mean it's no surprise the president
has come after you repeatedly
mr secretary of state he has told you to
resign
um and we all have listened to the phone
conversation uh he was very
forthcoming and his desire that uh you
do what you could to try to
recharacterize those
votes as he put it um you is it true
that he had made an attempt to
uh speak with you about this 18 times
can you confirm that
i apparently so but he was calling uh a
number that really wasn't the
appropriate number whoever was calling
from the white house i know he reached
out
you know the sec chief of staff mark
meadows reached out to my
uh chief of staff a week or so ago but
uh i wasn't interested in being then
because there was this ongoing
litigation
but anyway we had a phone call saturday
afternoon
my general counsel was on the call and
you know
we tried to respond respond to all the
misinformation this information
that i see he seems to believe for some
reason uh we'll dispute it
there are not one thousand or five
thousand dead people that voted in
georgia
our records showed that there's two and
that's the type of factual errors
that is just written with his uh you
know in his lawsuit
yeah um so you why did you decide to
take the phone call this time what was
different this time
i didn't know it was being recorded uh i
just was at my home
uh with my wife and i had it on
speakerphone but i didn't record
anything at my house
uh but i was making notes uh but
also then on sunday morning he put out a
twitter i thought we had a private
conversation just
no not left unsaid it was private but i
saw his man-to-man just having a
conversation
and uh you know and so with the
president united states
but then he goes out on twitter the next
morning and says stuff that's not true
first of all
he releases that we did have a
conversation so i didn't see what the
issue was then obviously we did have a
conversation the whole world knows
uh he's got 80 million million twitter
followers
but then he also said stuff that wasn't
true i was respectful of that
okay i i obviously you have a big
difference of opinion on um
you know on the way that uh the vote
went in november
but i'm just very curious we are 24
hours away from an election
so what was the discussion you say you
didn't realize that the phone call was
recorded at what point did you become
aware that the phone call was recorded
and tell us about the decision to
release the phone call the audio of the
phone call to the washington post
i think it was after uh
sunday when the twitter came out i
didn't see it or
anyway i became aware of it and
anyway so that's recording is out
there and now people can look at what
was the entirety of the comments that
were said
and then they can see what he said and
did you okay the release of the phone
call
did you did you say okay let's go ahead
and release the audio of the phone call
the information's out there
and uh it is what it is
that's not an answer to my question are
you going to answer my question did you
were you aware of the decision
and were you in favor of the decision to
release the phone call sir
i think that we had to respond to the
president's uh twitter
and we responded with the facts that
were in the call and that's how it got
out there
so now the world can just see what was
in there they can make up their own
decisions listen the whole thing
both sides of the aisle break down the
middle and they can make their own
decisions
all right so i mean that's pretty clear
that you were aware that it was going to
be released and that you were okay with
it
what about the impact on the two senate
elections because this has provided in
governor kemp's own words a distraction
to the election uh when the focus he
believes should be on
david perdue who called the release of
this disgusting and kelly leffler how do
you feel about the fact that releasing
the phone call
has taken up so much of the oxygen in a
very
important period of time before the
election
well the issues that president trump has
been raising
about all of his uh contentions that he
didn't have
a fair vote here in georgia that has
been a major distraction for the two
senators be able to run their race
in fact he's in effect been suppressing
republican turnout
and so uh we need to really have a
strong republican turnout
i think believe that if you listen that
tape you'll believe that president
trump's big focus
is not tomorrow it's actually wednesday
january 6th
well i mean that may be uh what his
focus is and we're going to learn more
when we see him at the rally this
evening but
i just want to ask you once again to
respond specifically to senator perdue
who said that he thought it was
inappropriate and disgusting to release
this audio what how do you respond to
him
on that charge um
senator perdue still owes my wife an
apology for all the death threats she
got
after he asked for my resignation and
i've not heard one peep from that man
since
he wants to call me face-to-face
man-to-man
i'll talk to him off the record but he
hasn't done that
so do you think you know it feels like
this is very much about a grudge
and uh between you and the president and
between you and mrs
about getting uh that foreign about
getting the facts out
because we just did a press release
today we did
president trump probably had eight to
ten points every one of his numbers were
wrong
and we have a poster board of all the
different numbers the actual numbers the
real numbers that we have
versus what they have and our numbers
will be supported in the court of law
their numbers will not be
all right just one last question i i
watched um after the
news conference that we just that we
just watched then we saw an interview
with jason miller who
was uh in charge of the campaign for
president trump's presidential election
he said
that he wants to know why the signature
verifications weren't done
fulton county is obviously a close focus
of theirs and of a lot of people why
those signatures weren't verified
not against the registration but against
the voter rolls from years past can you
answer that question for us
we have done signature match for this
entire year
we have done that both when you made an
application we did signature match
then we also did it when the ballots
came in we did signature match
and the county election officials we
made available to them gbi training with
signature match profile
when we did the cobb county signature
match audit
we looked at all the signatures we had
on file and did a signature match and of
those 15
118 people we had only two that were
questionable
it was actually the spouses signing for
their husbands that could have been
cured
uh but there was only two and in fact a
100 of those ballots
were actually lawfully cast and that is
when we had
actual uh an actual plaintiff
or an actual complaint that we just had
innuendo and
everything else that we've had but we
need cold hard facts
so we can do an investigation and that's
what we that's why right now we have
over 120
investigations going on from the
november election 250 total
investigations going up right now from
everything that's happened this year and
right now we have some that we've opened
up as part of this runoff race
all right uh thank you very much
secretary of state rafflinsburger good
to speak with you today
we'll see you thanks