Trump’s phone call with Georgia elections chief is impeachable by Democrats’ standards

Analysis: Outgoing president’s phone call shows he did not learn single lesson from impeachment, writes US political correspondent Griffin Connolly

Donald Trump’s phone calls have gotten him into considerable trouble over the years. (AFP via Getty Images)

It started with a (not so) “perfect” phone call with the new Ukrainian president in July 2019.

Then a whistleblower filed a complaint about that call.

Then the House launched an impeachment inquiry into the call and the circumstances surrounding it.

Then Donald Trump was impeached.

Then the Senate acquitted him.

Then Maine Senator Susan Collins, a Republican moderate who voted to acquit him, made this comment about the call: 

“I believe that the president has learned from this case. … The president has been impeached. That's a pretty big lesson. … He was impeached. And there has been criticism by both Republican and Democratic senators of his call.”

Ms Collins ended with this prediction about the call:

“I believe that he will be much more cautious in the future.”

The call

Eleven months and one presidential election later, Mr Trump has fallen under intense scrutiny yet again for a phone call in which he appears to leverage the powers of his office to blackmail someone for political gain.

This time, the man on the other end of the line was Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state official who oversaw the 2020 election where President-elect Joe Biden defeated Mr Trump by less than 12,000 votes, half a percentage point.

Instead of threatening to withhold aid from a foreign leader, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, unless Mr Zelenskiy publicises manufactured dirt on Mr Trump’s political rival, Mr Trump warns Mr Raffensperger of criminal prosecution unless he “find[s]” him enough votes to overturn Georgia’s democratic election.

The Raffensperger tape, based on what has been reported so far, is even more incriminating than the Zelenskiy transcript because there are no degrees of separation between Mr Trump’s request and the outcome of the election: His request of Mr Raffensperger is to literally, manually change the outcome of the election.

For roughly an hour, Mr Trump berated Mr Raffensperger in a taped tirade obtained and released on Sunday by The Washington Post.

Throughout the call Mr Raffensperger and his officials told the outgoing president that Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

They repeatedly told Mr Trump that his claims were based on a string of false and debunked conspiracy theories.

Mr Trump was not having it.

"The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said.

“And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

The president, who has less than three weeks left in office, continued: "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 insisted on the call that he had actually won Georgia, despite indisputable proof to the contrary.

“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Mr Trump said repeatedly.

“There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

He then warned Mr Raffensperger and his lawyer that they could be held criminally liable if they couldn’t find a way to prevent Mr Biden’s victory in the state by proving election fraud.

“That’s a criminal offense,” Mr Trump said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”

An empty threat… but still a threat

Of course, Mr Trump’s threat is completely toothless. First, he will leave the White House — whether of his own accord or whether he is dragged out by Secret Service — when Mr Biden is sworn in on 20 January. Secondly, Mr Raffensperger cannot be held criminally liable for failing to identify and throw out fraudulent ballots that, based on the evidence so far, don’t actually exist.

Mr Biden’s team has already come out with a statement condemning the call.

“We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,” Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer said in a statement to NBC News on Sunday. “It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy.”

Some House Democrats, who were gathered at the US Capitol in Washington on Sunday for the swearing-in of the new 117th Congress, have already begun making plans to formally censure the president.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “absolutely” believes the call represents an “impeachable offense,” she told reporters.

“If it was up to me, there would be articles on the floor, quite quickly,” the second-term New York Democrat said.

Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida, one of seven House impeachment managers for Mr Trump’s Senate trial last year, tweeted a quote from her closing argument about the potential for the president committing more impeachable offences.

“President Trump's constitutional crimes, his crimes against the American people and the nation, remain in progress,” Ms Demings said at the time.

Now, whose statement looks more prescient: Ms Collins’ or Ms Demings’?