(CNN)President Donald Trump pushed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” votes to overturn the election results after his loss to President-elect Biden, according to an audio recording of a phone call obtained by CNN and first reported by the Washington Post.
In excerpts of the stunning one-hour phone call Saturday, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said in one part of the call. Raffensperger responded, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
In another part, Trump said, “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
“You should want to have an accurate election. And you’re a Republican,” Trump said at one point.
“We believe that we do have an accurate election,” Raffensperger said in response, to which Trump replied, “No, no you don’t. Not even close. You’re off by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
The President also claimed during the call that votes in the state were scanned three times, an allegation Raffensperger rebuffed, saying, “We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”