Trump tapes: Taped quotes from fateful call that could land Donald Trump in world of trouble

How Donald Trump crossed ethical, moral and possibly legal lines with a fateful taped phone call urging Georgia’s secretary of state to ‘find the votes’ for him to win.

US President Donald Trump dances after speaking during a Make America Great Again rally in November. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/ AFP

President Trump has been accused of crossing ethical, moral and potentially legal boundaries in his phone call urging the secretary of state in Georgia to revise the election results to make him the winner rather than Joe Biden. Here, David Charter examines the most controversial excerpts and their possible consequences:

“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.”

Mr Trump’s exhortation to “find” the exact number of votes required to reverse the election outcome is seen as potentially the most damaging remark. Under federal law anyone who “knowingly and wilfully deprives, defrauds or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” is breaking the law. At state level, Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defence lawyer, told The New York Times: “It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes.”

“The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”

David Worley, the only Democratic party member of the five-member state election board in Georgia, wrote on Sunday evening to the board’s chairman, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and other members of the board asking him to open an investigation into the phone call to see if it violated state law, including a provision prohibiting conspiracy to commit election fraud. If the board believes a law has been broken it could ask state authorities to consider criminal charges or a civil case against Mr Trump, Mr Worley said. “To say that I am troubled by President Trump’s attempt to manipulate the votes of Georgians would be an understatement,” Mr Worley wrote.

“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. And I think you have to say that you’re going to re-examine it, and you can re-examine it, but re-examine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”

Mr Trump’s suggestion to deploy investigators who “want to find answers” could also violate both state and federal law, lawyers said. Some said Mr Trump may have broken a federal law against participating in a conspiracy against people exercising their civil rights. It has been used to prosecute acts of voter intimidation, notably by the Ku Klux Klan against black voters. Charging Mr Trump under this law would require prosecutors to show that someone else on the phone call was aiding and abetting a scheme, Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told The Washington Post.

“The ballots are corrupt … You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal offence. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.”

Mr Trump appeared to be trying to intimidate Mr Raffensperger on several occasions but Matthew Sanderson, a Republican election lawyer, said it was not clear that he broke the law.

While the president implied that Mr Raffensperger might suffer legal consequences if he did not find extra votes for him, Mr Trump stopped short of saying he would deliver on the threat himself, Mr Sanderson told The New York Times. He added that “ultimately, I doubt this is behaviour that would be prosecuted”.

“We have a number of things. We have at least two or three — anywhere from 250 to 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls. Much of that had to do with Fulton County, which hasn’t been checked. We think that if you check the signatures – a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County — you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged. And we are quite sure that’s going to happen.”

The so-called ballot drops often cited by Mr Trump as mysterious were simply the arrival during the count of the vote tally from counties in and around Atlanta that voted heavily for Joe Biden. These massive Biden votes have fuelled conspiracy theories about fraud. The Trump campaign called for signature checks but an audit in Cobb county found just one forged signature – a woman who signed for her husband. Now the Trump campaign is calling for a signature check in Fulton county.

“I think it’s pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made sense … There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

State and federal law officials will have to consider whether Mr Trump is knowingly trying to coerce Georgia officials to commit an election fraud crime. They may conclude that he believes all the conspiracy theories, which could complicate a potential prosecution. Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, told The Washington Post: “The president is either knowingly attempting to coerce state officials into corrupting the integrity of the election or is so deluded that he believes what he’s saying.” Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, tweeted: “His best defence would be insanity.”

The Times