President Trump offered another theory to explain why he lost the presidential election in Georgia.
Trump, who has yet to concede and promotes theories about election fraud, claimed that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s brother “works for China” and that “they definitely don’t want” Trump to win. Raffensperger does have a brother, despite numerous reports to the contrary, but he is not Ron Raffensperger.
Ron Raffensperger, who works as the chief technology officer for Huawei Enterprise Storage Solutions based in Shenzhen, China, is supposedly the man whom the president believes to be the Georgia secretary of state’s brother.
…The consent decree signed by the “Secretary”, with the consent of Kemp, is perhaps even more poorly negotiated than the deal that John Kerry made with Iran. Now it turns out that Brad R’s brother works for China, and they definitely don’t want “Trump”. So disgusting! #MAGA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2020
Ron Raffensperger appears to have pushed back on the claim that he’s related through an unverified Twitter account.
“No relation,” he said when asked if he was “related to him in any way,” and he requested that Gateway Pundit, a far-right news organization, retract a story about the supposed connection. “I think you need to public[ly] retract this. And the next time, do a minimal amount of due diligence.”
The Gateway Pundit story has since been deleted, and no editor’s note is available.
The Georgia secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Raffensperger, a Republican, has been at odds with President Trump and many GOP supporters and workers who have alleged the election was corrupt. He has repeatedly pushed back on conspiracy theories emanating from the president and his supporters, while this is the latest in a long string of verbal lashings from Trump.
He announced earlier this week that a signature audit, which had been requested by the Trump campaign, affirmed the original outcome. The signature audit in Cobb County found “no fraudulent absentee ballots” and said the county had “a 99.99% accuracy rate in performing correct signature verification procedures.”