Byron York’s Daily Memo: The Raffensperger problem

THE RAFFENSPERGER PROBLEM. It’s possible to have two entirely different but entirely compatible reactions to accounts of President Trump’s Saturday phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. First, the president clearly tried to press Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia from Biden to Trump. Even though Trump obviously believes the phantom votes are rightfully his, he stepped over the line of propriety by trying to push Georgia election officials to change the result.
 
At the same time, in the last 24 hours, Raffensperger has given shifty, evasive answers to basic questions about his decision to make his conversation with the president public. What was he trying to accomplish with the revelation, which just happened to come in the last hours of the Georgia Senate race? Raffensperger appears to have acted more from personal motivations than a desire to expose the president’s misconduct.
 
The story came out Monday afternoon, when Raffensperger appeared on Fox News. Raffensperger said the conversation with Trump was not privileged, as some Trump defenders have said. He said the president had tried to call him in the past but had the wrong number, making the call on Saturday the first time the two men had spoken about the Georgia election. He said that Trump’s allegations of massive fraud in Georgia are false. All of those comments were uncontroversial and entirely expected.

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Then Raffensperger addressed the fact that the call was recorded and later given to the Washington Post. “I didn’t know it was being recorded,” Raffensperger said. “I just was at home with my wife. And I had it on speakerphone. But I didn’t record anything at my house.” Raffensperger said he made notes of the conversation, but did nothing else.
 
“Then on Sunday morning, he [Trump] put out a Twitter,” Raffensperger continued. “I thought we had a private conversation, just not — left unsaid that it was private. But I just thought it was man-to-man, just having a conversation…But then he goes out on Twitter the next morning and says stuff that’s not true. First of all, he releases that we did have a conversation…The whole world knows. He’s got 80 million Twitter followers. But then he also says stuff that wasn’t true…”
 
The tweet to which Raffensperger referred was sent at 8:57 a.m. on Sunday. Trump said: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters,’ dead voters, and more. He has no clue!” Exactly 90 minutes later, at 10:27 a.m., Raffensperger responded, also on Twitter: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.” That clearly suggested something was coming.

Two hours and 33 minutes later, at exactly 1:00 p.m., the Washington Post tweeted: “Exclusive: ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes‘: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate vote in his favor.” The tweet linked to a 2,000-word story featuring extensive quotes from the hour-plus conversation, accompanied by a four and a half minute audio clip with some of the talk’s most important exchanges.

In his interview with MacCallum, Raffensperger would not say how all that happened. He would not say whether he had been a part of the decision — made by whom? — to release the call. Here is his exchange with MacCallum:
 
MacCALLUM: You say you didn’t realize that the phone call was recorded. At what point did you become aware that the phone call was recorded? And tell us about the decision to release the phone call, the audio of the phone call, to the Washington Post.
 
RAFFENSPERGER: I think it was after Sunday, when the Twitter came out. I didn’t see it, or — anyway, I became aware of it. And anyway, so that’s — recording is out there. And now people can look at what was the entirety of the comments that were said. And then they can see what he said, versus what I said.
 
MacCALLUM: But were you consulted? And did you OK the release of the phone call? Did you say, “OK, let’s go ahead and release the audio of the phone call?”
 
RAFFENSPERGER: The information is out there. And it is what it is.
 
MacCALLUM: That’s not an answer to my question. Are you going to answer my question? Did you — were you aware of the decision and were you in favor of the decision to release the phone call, sir?
 
RAFFENSPERGER: I think that we had to respond to the president’s Twitter. And we responded with the facts that were in the call. And that’s how it got out there. So now the world can just see what was in there. They can just make up their own decisions, listen to the whole thing, both sides of the aisle, right down the middle. And they can make their own decisions.
 
Throughout the interview, Raffensperger would not take responsibility for the recording and release of the conversation. “The information is out there,” he said. “And it is what it is.” And then there was the question of why Raffensperger did it. MacCallum asked him about his apparent anger at Georgia Republican Senator David Perdue, whose political future is on the ballot in one of the Senate runoffs:
 
MacCALLUM: I just want to ask you once again to respond specifically to Senator Perdue, who said he thought it was inappropriate and disgusting to release this audio. How do you respond to him on that charge?
 
RAFFENSPERGER: Senator Perdue still owes my wife an apology for all the death threats she got after he asked for my resignation. And I have not heard one peep from that man since. If he wants to call me face-to-face, man-to-man, I will talk to him off the record. But he hasn’t done that.
 
MacCALLUM: So, do you think — it feels like this is very much about a grudge —
 
RAFFENSPERGER: It’s not a grudge at all.
 
MacCALLUM: Between you and the president, and between you and Mr. Perdue.
 
RAFFENSPERGER: It’s really about getting — Martha, it’s really about getting the facts out, because we just did a press release today.
 
MacCallum was right: It really did feel very much like a grudge. To the degree that releasing the Trump conversation will damage Perdue’s chances in the runoff — that is still unclear — at the very least it appears that Raffensperger acted while deeply angry at Perdue.
 
Of course, Raffensperger says he released the call to expose the president’s lies. But that is not at all clear. On Monday, Brendan Keefe, a reporter for Atlanta’s WXIA-TV, asked Raffensperger, “If the president hadn’t tweeted, and tweeted something that was false, would we have ever heard that call recording?”
 
“No,” answered Raffensperger. “It was a private conversation, as far as I was concerned. And he broke privacy when he put out a tweet, but then his tweet was false…If President Trump wouldn’t have tweeted out anything and would have stayed silent, we would have stayed silent as well, and that would have just been a conversation between him and I, man-to-man, and that would have been just fine with us. But he is the one that had to put it out on Twitter. And so, if you’re going to put out stuff that we don’t believe is true, then we’re going to respond in kind.”
 
So there it is. Raffensperger was effectively saying that even after he heard everything the president said on the call, he had no intention of releasing the recording. It was only after Trump attacked him on Twitter that Raffensperger decided to give the story to the Washington Post. That suggests that Raffensperger’s motive was not to expose the president’s misconduct but to get back at the president — and perhaps Perdue, too — after a Twitter attack.
 
Is that the real story? It’s impossible to know. It should always be noted that Trump was wrong to press Raffensperger on the vote totals. The president stepped over the line of propriety. But Raffensperger’s story, at least what we know of it so far, raises questions about his conduct, too.