An angry former President Donald Trump claimed vindication after the Washington Post corrected an article claiming he directed a Georgia elections investigator to “find the fraud,” using it to condemn media organizations and once again claim widespread vote-rigging occurred in November’s election.
“While I appreciate the Washington Post’s correction, which immediately makes the Georgia Witch Hunt a non-story, the original story was a Hoax, right from the very beginning,” he said in a statement sent by his Save America political action committee.
He also used the episode to call for an investigation into the way the election was run in the state’s most populous county and into Democratic leader Stacey Abrams’s political operation.
It suggests the former president is still stewing over the manner of his defeat last year and is looking for opportunities to attack rivals and question the results in several swing states he lost to President Biden. His own Justice Department last year announced it was unable to find evidence of the widespread voter fraud he claimed.
RECORDING OF TRUMP CALL TO GEORGIA INVESTIGATOR REVEALED
The controversy stems from one of a number of calls Trump made to Georgia officials as he sought to overturn the state’s result.
In early January, a recording showed how he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” sufficient votes to reverse Biden’s win in the state.
But the correction stems from an earlier conversation. The original Washington Post story claimed that Trump urged Georgia’s most senior elections official to “find the fraud,” during a Dec. 23 conversation, saying the official would be a “national hero.”
However, on Monday, the newspaper issued a correction saying that Trump had said neither of those things.
“Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there,” it said. “He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.’”
In his statement, Trump called for further investigation.
“We are seeking to find and reveal the large-scale election fraud which took place in Georgia,” he said. “Many residents agree, and their anger caused them not to turn out and vote for two Republican Senators in the January election.”
Many senior Republicans disagree. They blame Trump himself for the double Georgia defeat, arguing that his claims of fraud in November deterred many of his supporters from turning out to vote.
But Trump said he and Republicans were victims of systematic bias in a “media establishment” in which “errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies” only run one way.
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“Look no further than the negative coverage of the vaccine that preceded the election and the overdue celebration of the vaccine once the election had concluded. A strong democracy requires a fair and honest press,” he said as he thanks the Washington Post for its correction. “This latest media travesty underscores that legacy media outlets should be regarded as political entities — not journalistic enterprises.”
