On Saturday, January 2, 2021, at around 3:00 p.m., former President Donald J. Trump placed a call to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Throughout the roughly hour-long call, the former president repeatedly insisted that he had won the state of Georgia “by hundreds of thousands of votes.”[1] As purported evidence, Trump cited “rally size” and “political people” who he said assured him that “there’s no way they [the Biden campaign] beat me.”[2] He cycled through a list of conspiracy theories to explain his loss, covering “3,000 pounds” of shredded ballots; drop boxes “being delivered and delivered late”; a particular “professional vote scammer and hustler” who Trump claimed destroyed no fewer than 18,000 of his votes; and “the other thing, dead people.”[3] At one point, when Raffensperger responded to one of Trump’s false claims by cautioning him that “the problem you have with social media [is that]…people can say anything,” Trump answered: “Oh, this isn’t social media. This is Trump media.”[4]
Fulton County, Georgia’s Trump Investigation (brookings.edu)
