Nearly 100 Democrats Back Censuring Trump Over Georgia Call

Then-President Donald Trump and then-first lady Melania Trump walk on the south lawn of the White House in Washington on Dec. 23, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Nearly 100 Democratic House members signed onto a resolution to censure President Donald Trump after his phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger where Trump discussed alleged election fraud and put pressure on Raffensberger, although some—including Trump’s campaign—have said the excerpts of the phone call were taken entirely out of context.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced the resolution Monday to censure the president. Now, 91 other Democrats have signed on to the measure, Johnson’s office said in a statement.

Trump’s campaign adviser, Jason Miller, said news outlets took a portion of the call where Trump asked Raffensberger to “find 11,780 votes” was taken out of context.

Outlets “published 4 minutes and 31 seconds - where is the other 35 minutes?” Miller asked on Sunday before the rest of the call was released. “The reason we would talk about finding thousands more ballots is because, guess what, in the state of Georgia they have already found thousands of Trump ballots that were never counted before Election Day,” Miller told Newsmax a day later.

But Democrats, according to the text of their resolution (pdf) to censure, accused the president of abusing his power and “threatening an elected official.” They further alleged that Trump’s call was “an attempt to willfully deprive the citizens of Georgia of a fair and impartial election process.”

Trump should also “retract and disavow this unlawful and unconstitutional behavior,” they claimed.

In the phone call, Trump spoke at length with Raffensberger and other officials, making numerous references to allegations of election fraud and irregularities in the Peach State.

Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) (L) speaks as Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) listens during a House Judiciary Committee markup hearing on the Articles of Impeachment against President Donald Trump at the Longworth House Office Building in Washington on Dec. 12, 2019. Andrew Harrer - Pool/Getty Images

Raffensperger said on Monday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis might launch an investigation into whether the president committed a crime.

Several Democratic lawmakers also sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray to launch a criminal investigation into the call. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) along with Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.), wrote, “The evidence of election fraud by Mr. Trump is now in broad daylight.”

Republican Senate candidate David Perdue alleged that Raffensberger or his office leaked the phone call.

“To have a statewide elected official, regardless of party, tape without disclosing a conversation—private conversation—with the president of the United States, and then leaking it to the press is disgusting,” Perdue, a former senator whose Senate term ended earlier this week, told Fox News. Perdue is up for reelection on Jan. 5 against Democrat Jon Ossof.

“I didn’t hear anything in that tape that the president hasn’t already said for weeks now since the November election,” he said.

And on Monday, Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz accused news outlets of taking the phone call out of context.

“He’s not saying I want you to create the vote,” said Dershowitz in an interview with Just The News. “He’s not saying I want you to manufacture or concoct the votes. He’s saying, and he’s been saying this for months, on Twitter and his statements and his campaign’s, he thinks that people voted for him and those votes weren’t counted. He’s entitled as a citizen, as a candidate, to say, ‘I want you to find those votes, I want you to find the votes that will pass for me and what weren’t counted, I want you to find votes that were cast against me that shouldn’t have been counted—by people who are dead people, who are out of state.”

The lawyer added that he “went through every word of that transcript, there is no crime there, period.”