Donald Trump heavily criticised, with demands for impeachment, after call about Georgia election

With 16 days left of his presidency, a secret recording of Donald Trump pressuring election officials on the result has been met with disgust.

US President Donald Trump has been labelled desperate and disgraceful, with calls for his impeachment or prosecution, after a leaked phone call revealed him placing pressure on a top election official to find votes to overturn the Georgia result.

The Washington Post obtained audio of a phone call between Mr Trump and Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where he attempts to change the outcome of the presidential race, which was won by Joe Biden.

Despite legal challenges, Georgia certified its vote after counting it three times in the wake of the election, confirming Mr Biden’s victory by a final margin of 11,779.

While speaking at a campaign event for Democratic senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in Savannah, Georgia on Sunday, vice president-elect Kamala Harris described Mr Trump’s pleas as the “voice of desperation”.

“Have ya’ll heard about that recorded conversation? Well it was, yes, certainly, the voice of desperation, most certainly that, and it was a bald, bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the President of the United States,” she said.

The hour-long phone call included several similar exchanges, with Mr Trump insisting he actually won Georgia easily. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also condemned Mr Trump’s behaviour, calling for his impeachment.

“I absolutely think it’s an impeachable offence and if it was up to me there would be articles on the floor quite quickly,’ she said. ‘But he, I mean he is trying to – he is attacking our very election.”

She was backed by a number of social media users who also rallied for Mr Trump to be impeached. He previously faced impeachment in December 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but was cleared.

It would be both permissible and appropriate for the new House to impeach Donald Trump tomorrow based on this conversation alone. https://t.co/nQgxtMH5CA

— Seth Masket (@smotus) January 3, 2021

IMPEACH HIM AGAIN https://t.co/ctIdmK9QSb

— Rob Anderson 🇺🇸 (@RobAnderson2018) January 3, 2021

Impeach. Prosecute. At the very least, censure him. The president threatened a state election official with criminal charges unless he manufactured votes to throw an election. The only consequence for that cannot merely be that the state election official said “no.”

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 3, 2021

Several lawyers claimed that Mr Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, while Congressional Democrats vowed to examine the legal implications of the call.

Attacking Mr Trump’s “disgraceful effort to intimidate an elected official”, Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin appealed for a criminal investigation.

“President Trump’s recorded conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger is more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional rant,” Mr Durbin said in a statement to Fox News. “His disgraceful effort to intimidate an elected official into deliberately changing and misrepresenting the legally confirmed vote totals in his state strikes at the heart of our democracy and merits nothing less than a criminal investigation.”

It has been two months since the election, which Mr Biden won with 306 electoral votes to Mr Trump’s 232. The threshold for victory was 270. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

Yet former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, Trevor Potter, argued it would be a decision for the Justice Department in Biden’s administration.

“There is a good argument that Trump is seeking to procure a fraudulent vote count by stating that he needs exactly 11,780 votes and is threatening the secretary of state if he does not produce them,” Mr Potter told The New York Times. “But even if the Biden Justice Department thinks they have a good case, is that how they want to start off the Biden presidency? That is a policy decision.”

But Mr Trump didn’t just have his detractors. His campaign senior adviser Jason Miller came out firing on Twitter, defending the President’s actions.

And the full recording will show that @GaSecofState is still a hack, @realDonaldTrump is spot-on in his criticisms of the terrible job Raffensperger did, all of the officials running Georgia’s elections are trash, and @POTUS won the state. #MAGA https://t.co/uqdRTdqUhf

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) January 3, 2021

A Republican candidate for governor of California, Errol Webber, also questioned the legality of releasing the tapes.

So now it’s okay to just illegally release confidential phone calls with the President? Wow! #TrumpTapes

— Errol Webber For CA Governor (@ErrolWebber) January 3, 2021

On Twitter, users likened Mr Trump’s phone call to Watergate, the political scandal which forced Richard Nixon out of office after his administration attempted to cover up continuous attempts to break into the Democratic National Committee.

Every network should be breaking into coverage right now with a Special Report to share with viewers Donald Trump, on tape, threatening a Secretary of State to manufacture votes to steal an election. The most damning tape since Watergate.

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) January 3, 2021

Is this worse than Watergate? https://t.co/FQKL0wcjjK

— Brian Moore (@brianmoore666) January 3, 2021

Congress is expected to certify the election results on January 6, despite 100 Republican House members indicating they would object to results in a number of states.