Atlanta jurors hear another Trump appeal for 2020 vote

News

from Mark Moore

March 16, 2023 | 5:48 p.m

​Members of a special grand jury in Atlanta investigating former President Donald Trump’s alleged meddling in the 2020 Georgia election say they heard another tape of Trump pressuring a top Republican lawmaker to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the Peach State , according to a report.

The previously unreported phone call between Trump and the late Georgia House Speaker David Ralston is the third time the former president has asked a public official to overturn an election result, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the conversation, weeks after Election Day, Trump urged Ralston to call a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia, the first time a Democrat had won the state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1992.

But Ralston refused.

One of the five jurors — three men and two women — on the 23-member panel interviewed by the AJC said Ralston, who died last November, “virtually cut the president.”

“He said, ‘I’m going to do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just took the wind out of the sails,” Jury told the newspaper. “Well, thank you, you know, is all the president can say.”

Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, claiming the results were fraudulent, and sought his help in organizing the election for him.

“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,” Trump said during the leaked call. “There’s no way I’m going to lose Georgia. No way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”​

Audio recordings also emerged of Trump’s December 2020 conversation with Frances Watson, then the state’s top election investigator, asking her to review absentee ballots in Cobb County.

Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis convened the jury shortly after the Raffensperger call was revealed, and it first convened in May 2022.

The panel heard testimony from about 75 witnesses, including many allies and associates of the former president.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani testified, as did Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-C.), as well as Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Raffensperger himself.

The jurors who spoke to the newspaper were not identified and would not discuss the grand jury’s final report, which is sealed.​​

Emily Kors, the grand jury’s foreman, caused a stir in February when she embarked on a whirlwind media tour and told reporters that “this is not a short list” in response to questions about who could be charged in connection with the investigation.