why did the president help incite the riot that killed five people at the capitol
it may be because four days earlier he failed to get the state of georgia to take away
joe biden's victory a week ago saturday georgia's top election official secretary
of state brad rappensberger spent an hour on the phone listening to the president lie and
threatened mr trump spun tales of fraud and told raffensberger he needed to find 11 780 votes
one more vote than biden's winning margin in the state raffensberger is a lifelong
republican voted for mr trump and contributed to his campaign but facing the president's
wrath he would not choose loyalty over duty the story will continue in a moment
i believe i said well mr president the challenge that you have is that you have bad data
our data shows that you did not win the race because we have the facts and the
facts are on our side brad rappensberger had declined to take the president's call
the trump campaign was suing georgia officials and raffensberger felt the call was inappropriate but
the white house kept insisting okay all right so mr president everybody is on the line it was about
three in the afternoon saturday january second when white house chief of staff mark meadows
started the conference call introducing mr trump's lawyers an attorney for the state of georgia ryan
germany and secretary of state raffensberger did you know that the call was being recorded
no so mr president i'll turn it over to you someone gave the recording to the washington post
okay thank you very much hello brad and ryan and everybody from the start the
president seemed delusional and we uh we won the house but we won every single state house
and we won congress mr trump repeated 30 times that he won the election he said he could still
win georgia if raffensberger would play along so look all i want to do is this i just want to find
uh 11 780 votes what was the president asking you to do he was asking us to recalibrate or
recalculate i believe it was recalculate somehow get a different answer but i'm an engineer and
anyone that's good with numbers knows you can calculate all you want but the numbers are the
numbers so what are we going to do here folks i only need 11 000 votes fellas i need 11 000
votes give me a break but the words used by the president and the president's chief of staff
give me a break cooperate compromise were they asking you to join them in a conspiracy uh
i guess maybe they were just trying to intimidate me and and uh cajole me into something it
wasn't gonna happen we have learned the call january 2nd was not mr trump's first attempt
sources tell us that last month the president himself phoned one of the georgia secretary of
state's investigators a person briefed on the call said mr trump told the investigator they
would be a national hero if they found evidence of fraud but no evidence was found that would
change the outcome of the election still on the call with the georgia's secretary of state
mr trump badgered raffensberger with fantasies of criminality the other thing dead people
so dead people voted and i think uh the the number is in the pro close to 5 000 people
the president said in the call that 5 000 georgians voted in the name of dead people
right well it was two two ten thousand no two yeah a total of two two people right right here
one two two dead people not thousands not hundreds two people how do you know that
because we went back and looked and we searched all the death records and we looked at day month
year so we had two people that had passed away and we'll investigate and see if we can find
out who those people were that fraudulently voted for those two dead people that is just
one of dozens of investigations launched after the election by the georgia secretary of state
how would you describe the president's claims of vote fraud in georgia fantastical unreasonable uh
lacking in any factual reality gabriel sterling also a republican and a trump voter is the chief
operating officer for the secretary of state so you can see he walked us through surveillance
video that the president and his lawyer rudy giuliani use as their slam dunk evidence there's
no response none here giuliani is explaining to georgia state senators his selectively edited
version of the video when you look at what you saw on the video which to me was a smoking gun
powerful smoking gun well i don't don't have to be a genius to figure out what happened
and i don't have to be a genius to figure out that those votes are not legitimate vote
in national ads the trump campaign shows just a clip of the video that reveals
cases filled with ballots being removed from under a table america deserved an honest election
this is what they got suitcases of ballots added in secret in georgia gabriel sterling
showed us that rudy giuliani was right you don't have to be a genius to figure out what happened
when you look at all of the video sterling says the election workers were told before
10 o'clock election night that they would be going home and would finish the count the next
day it's before 10 the observers in the press are still in the room to see all of this occur
with republican and democratic observers visible on the video the still uncounted ballots were
placed in official boxes which were labeled locked with tamper-proof seals and stored below the table
this is where they're packing up because they think they're going home they're packing up to
seal them so that nobody can you know mess with the ballots when no one's there
but less than an hour after the boxes were stored sterling says the staff was told they
would have to keep counting through the night so the ballots were pulled out and counted
sterling told us president trump's team had always had the entire unedited video from my point of
view they intentionally misled the state senators the people of georgia and the people united states
about this to cause this conspiracy theory to keep going and keep the disinformation going which has
caused this environment that we're seeing today are you saying they lied to the georgia state
senate i'm saying rudy giuliani looked them in the eye and lied and rudy giuliani knows that he also
i belong believe you know he has some ethical standards as a member of the bar he knows that
what he said was not true but our state senate did not ask us to come in there so that we could
rebut what they said and it was actually left as the gospel truth and it wasn't it was fabricated
in the call president trump slanders one of the election workers in the video
a woman named ruby freeman who georgia officials say is not suspected of tampering with anything
18 000 voters having to do with ruby freeman that's she's a vote scammer
a professional vote scammer and hustler ruby freeman uh that is uh that was the tape that's
been shown all over the world that makes everybody look bad the president claimed freeman put the
so-called ballots hidden in suitcases through the counter three times resulting in 54 000 bogus
votes and brad why did they put the uh votes in three times you know they put them in three times
they did not put that we we can we did an audit of that and we've proved conclusively that they were
not scanned three times ruby freeman is in hiding because of threats death threats that sterling
says other election workers are also receiving i finally saw one that said the young man's name
said you are a traitor may god have mercy on your soul and had a gift of a noose slowly swinging
at that point i snapped i essentially lost it and said this has got to stop
mr president five weeks ago gabriel sterling addressed this directly to
the president what you don't have the ability to do and you need to step up and say this
is stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence someone's going to get hurt someone's
going to get shot someone's going to get killed now that we saw the mob attacked the capital
is that what you meant yes that's exactly what i meant in continuing the disinformation
and spinning up people's anger while they're emotionally raw this is exactly what you're
going to see even raffensberger was threatened by the president who said the georgia secretary
of state was culpable in the fantasy fraud it's more illegal for you than it is for them
because you know what they did and you're not reporting it that's a you know that's a criminal
that's a criminal offense and and you know you can't let that happen that's that's a big risk
to you and to ryan your lawyer that's a big risk well i think it was obviously a veiled threat
maybe a direct threat but there is no substance of what he was saying 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 when you heard those words what did you think very costly
i heard the threat
i don't know what that meant exactly but it wasn't going to move me off center
but i i mean all of this stuff is is very dangerous stuff when you talk about no criminality
i think it's very dangerous for you to say that the president of the united states is saying brad
this could be very dangerous for you well really what it did is i think it really
revealed for us um was his character and it was just a sad moment to really hear that
the president also suggested that someone tampered with georgia's voting machines
but gabriel sterling the secretary of state's chief operating officer told us the state hand
counted all of the voting machines paper ballot receipts the state of georgia hand counted
how many ballots a little over five million and when you hand counted the five million how did
that compare to what the electronic machines were saying they came back at point one zero
five three percent off in the total number of ballots and point zero zero nine nine percent
off the margin which is incredibly close you would consider that to be virtually identical
yes i wonder how it feels trying to push back against the president of the united states who
was making all of these claims it's like having a shovel in your hand and trying to empty the ocean
when the president was making his speech on wednesday and citing that mob in washington
he complained about weak and pathetic republicans no it's amazing the weak republicans they're
pathetic republicans he was talking about you well i think he was talking about others
i think actually i showed that i had some courage i had some gumption that i actually would do my
job the ones that cow toweled him that just bent over and did his bidding and not looking into the
facts i think that's weakness brad rapensberger told us he didn't see the bloody attack on the
capitol when it was happening because at that moment he was busy sending congress a 10-page
point-by-point rebuttal of the president's false claims he learned later that the members of the
house and senate were under attack it was surreal we've never seen anything like that in 150 years
maybe even longer probably 200 years it was really an affront to the people that founded this nation
people need to go back and read their history books you know we had some great founders i
know they weren't perfect men but they were great people they're some of the most learned people we
had in our society and that's the highly ideal that we all should kind of elevate ourselves to
to be noble people of high character and patriotic and love our country