Trump has fought hard to 'suppress' his 'perfect' call to GA secretary of state: report

27 September 2023

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Former President Donald Trump has maintained that he did nothing wrong during his now-infamous early January 2021 phone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — a conservative Republican who has pushed back against Trump's false claims of a stolen election. Publicly, Trump has stuck with his claim that the call was "perfect" and that he broke no laws when he asked Raffensperger to "find" him votes.

But according to reporting from journalists Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng in an article published by Rolling Stone on September 27, Trump has had a different type of argument behind closed doors. Privately, they report, Trump has been furious with Raffensperger for making a recording of their call publicly available. And he wants to see his "perfect" call excluded from being used as evidence.

Rawnsley and Suebsaeng report, "In private, sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, the former president sounded a different tone about the conversation, asking his attorneys to draw up proposals for how to suppress its use in the criminal case against him."

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Trump is the target of four criminal indictments, one of them in Georgia — where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis alleges that Trump and his allies violated racketeering laws in their efforts to overturn the results of an election that Trump lost.

"As his criminal prosecution in Fulton County, Georgia, built momentum in recent months," Rawnsley and Suebsaeng explain, "that call only gained in importance. Since last year, Trump has been briefed multiple times by some of his legal advisers on specific strategies for attempting to get the tape tossed out in court, according to two sources familiar with the matter. At Trump's urging, some of the former president's legal advisers have prepared arguments to try and suppress the call, and discussed them at the upper ranks of Trumpland for months."

The reporters continue, "Those proposals have been criticized by some of Trump's close advisers, who found the legal theories to be flawed and believed it was better to just argue in court that Trump did nothing wrong or illegal on the recording, rather than try to suppress it outright."

Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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