Thread by @weareoversight

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. His efforts to dispute that fact have dominated American politics for over half a year. This week for #FoiaFriday, we’re breaking down what we know about Trump’s efforts to change the results in Georgia.

Trump was seemingly intensely focused on Georgia after he lost that state’s election. He repeatedly appealed to state officials in an apparent effort to undermine the state’s election results.

On December 5, Trump called Georgia Gov. Brain Kemp to pressure him to urge the state legislature to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. He encouraged Kemp to conduct an audit of absentee ballot signatures.
washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…

On Dec. 23, then-Pres. Trump called and pressured the chief investigator at the Georgia secretary of state's office to find “the right answer.” The @WSJ published the audio of this call—which Georgia also released to us.
americanoversight.org/document/georg…

On Dec. 28, a DOJ official wrote a draft letter which urged top officials in Georgia to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud. Luckily, the acting attorney general and acting deputy AG refused to sign off on the letter. abcnews.go.com/US/doj-officia…

On Dec. 30, an aide to Mark Meadows, who was then Trump’s chief of staff, contacted Georgia’s deputy secretary of state Jordan Fuchs, according to records we uncovered. This showed yet another person in Trump’s administration pressuring Georgia officials.

https://twitter.com/weareoversight/status/1370028430293528578

Reuter’s @LindaSoReports reported that in the phone call, Meadows’s legislative advisor Cassidy Hutchinson asked Fuchs if there was anything the White House could do to show gratitude to the people conducting the review of the election results.
reuters.com/article/us-usa…

On Jan. 1, Meadows sent acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen a YouTube video that claimed the election was stolen using satellites in Italy. “Pure insanity,” Rosen commented to acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.
politico.com/news/2021/06/1…

The next day, Jan. 2, Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump said. washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…

Two days later, on Jan. 4, Byung J. Pak resigned from his position as a U.S. Attorney in Atlanta. Pak reportedly later told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Trump intended to fire him for refusing to falsely say Georgia experienced widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Georgia was also part of the December 2020 fake electoral certificates scheme. Trump supporters in seven states met and created fake certificates awarding their electoral votes to Trump, even though Joe Biden had actually won those states.

Less than a month later, as Congress prepared to certify the electoral vote count, Trump advisers promoted a scheme that called for Vice President Pence to cite the existence of these fake certificates as justification for disregarding the legitimate votes from those states.

This week, CNN reported that FBI agents had interviewed a Georgia Republican who had originally been set to serve as one of the real electors. “They just asked who talked to me,” the would-be elector, Patrick Gartland, told CNN.
cnn.com/2022/05/26/pol…

All of these details reveal the repeated, coordinated effort of Donald Trump — and members of his administration — to dismiss the will of the voters and overturn a democratic election. We’re determined to continue to investigate this shocking plan.

In January 2021, we filed requests Freedom of Information Act requests with the Justice Department for records and communications regarding Pak’s resignation.
americanoversight.org/investigations…

We have also filed requests for records from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state, governor, and attorney general regarding Trump’s attempts to alter the election results.
americanoversight.org/investigation/…

And we have also investigated the efforts to undermine public confidence in the election’s integrity that started long before Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

We sued for records of the state’s voter fraud task force, and the lack of substantive information in the state’s response revealed the task force to be another way of promoting false narratives about widespread voter fraud.
americanoversight.org/georgias-secre…

You can follow our ongoing investigation into efforts to undermine the election results in Georgia — and to use false claims of widespread voter fraud to impose further voting restrictions — here:
americanoversight.org/jurisdiction/g…