January 6 Committee Grills Georgia Republican Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appeared before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol this week to provide testimony about former President Donald Trump‘s efforts to pressure him to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Raffensperger, a Republican whose duties include overseeing state elections, spent four hours speaking with congressional investigators about the interactions that Trump initiated after his 332-206 Electoral College defeat.

“I spoke to the January 6th committee to ensure they included the full record of how stolen election claims damage our democracy — whether in 2016, 2018, or 2020. While liberals in Washington, D.C. remain focused on Trump, conservatives should focus on the kitchen table issues that really matter to the American people,” Raffensperger said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday evening. “We talked about that and everything else leading into the election. That was their focus, because that was where the greatest disinformation was foisted upon our nation.”

Trump lost Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes to President Joe Biden by a margin of 11,779 votes. Despite there being no evidence of fraud – which Trump has nonetheless insisted since before ballots were even cast last November – Trump demanded in a clandestine phone call to Raffensperger in January that he “find” the votes to switch the election to Trump’s favor.

“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump crowed. “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

Raffensperger stood his ground, explaining to Trump that “the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”

That conversation has sparked a grand jury investigation into whether Trump should be indicted for criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, intentional interference with the performance of election duties, conspiracy and racketeering.