The second "perfect call"

We can safely surmise that Trump's Georgia call, along with his Ukraine call, are merely two instances of what have been four years of "perfect calls".

DRUDGE HEADLINE: “COMMANDER IN THIEF?”

CARL BERNSTEIN: “This was something far worse than Watergate.”

[...]

On Sunday, politics here switched from a national fascination to an international spectacle, courtesy of — surprise! — President Donald Trump, who was secretly recorded trying to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw out votes for an opponent and “find” votes for himself.

[...]

It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia.

[...]

So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”

  Politico

CREW is investigating Graham's election tampering.

Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.

[...]

“This phone call is bad,” Georgia conservative commentator Erick Erickson said on Twitter. We asked him to expand on that, and here’s what he added: “I think the general worry is that the GOP early vote [in the Georgia runoffs] actually came on strong [late] and there’s a real worry that the president shows up tomorrow and messes it all up. The North Georgia GOP has to turn out on Election Day. They’ve lagged the whole state. The President goes to Dalton tomorrow to get them out and now people are worried he spends his time attacking the GA GOP … There is real nervousness.”

Erickson and other Republicans have been concerned since November that the president’s voter fraud rhetoric will dampen turnout, a fear intensified by far-right activists who’ve suggested that Trump voters not go to the polls unless Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue fight harder to somehow cancel Biden’s Georgia win. Trump’s handling of a coronavirus relief package and his vetoing of a defense bill is another concern: Congress overrode the vote, but Perdue and Loeffler skipped out so they weren’t crosswise with Trump.

[...]

“Look, voters aren’t paying attention to all this stuff, people like us are,” one Georgia Republican strategist who’s working to elect Loeffler and Perdue told Playbook. “But at a certain point, all these little things that don’t look like they matter could matter. I still feel OK. But this doesn’t help. The president needs to cut out the Leeroy Jenkins s---. Unfortunately, he won’t.”

[...]

WAPO’S DAN BALZ: “There are but 16 days left in President Trump’s term, but there is no doubt that he will use all of his remaining time in office to inflict as much damage as he can on democracy — with members of a now-divided Republican Party acting as enablers.”

[...]

Suffice to say it’s a bit alarming that 10 former defense secretaries felt the need to get this on the record in the WaPo: “As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”

[...]

Late Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas announced he would not join a dozen of his Republican colleagues and object to the certification of electoral votes on Wednesday.

I wonder who said what to Cotton to get him to correct course. Maybe Paul Ryan's statement did it?

"Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden's victory strike at the foundation of our republic. It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American Democracy.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that it was unlikely his office would open an investigation into his weekend phone call with President Donald Trump, but suggested a criminal probe could still be launched by an Atlanta-area district attorney.

  Politico

I'd say both are unlikely, even though they should be done.

On Monday, Raffensperger declined to say whether he personally found Trump’s requests in their conversation to be lawful.

“I’m not a lawyer. All I know is that we’re going to follow the law, follow the process,” he said. “Truth matters. And we’ve been fighting these rumors for the last two months.”

[...]

Because Trump personally spoke with Raffensperger on Saturday and recently had a conversation with the chief investigator in the secretary of state’s office, Raffensperger told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview Monday morning that “there may be a conflict of interest" that would inhibit any potential investigation.

Not unless Georgia's AG isn't independent of the secretary's office.

Raffensperger went on to say: “I understand that the Fulton County District Attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”

Good enough. No pardon is possible for Trump for any crimes committed against the state of Georgia.

Trump asked that officials determine that ballots were shredded in Fulton County and that Dominion election machinery was removed or tampered with. He also suggested Raffensperger could be guilty of a “criminal offense” by knowing about alleged election interference and not reporting it.

In fact, it is the president who may have opened himself up to legal liability in the phone call, potentially violating federal and state statutes intended to guard against the solicitation of election fraud.

[...]

And despite the Times’ reporting that the White House switchboard had made 18 other calls to the secretary’s office over the past two months, Raffensperger maintained that he had never spoken to Trump prior to Saturday.

“No, I never believed it was appropriate to speak to the president. But he pushed out — I guess he had his staff push us. They wanted to call,” Raffensperger said.

[...]

Although “I just preferred not to talk to someone when we’re in litigation,” Raffensperger continued, “we took the call, and we had a conversation.”

Perhaps we should be glad he did. But Trump's team is claiming the taping of the conversation violates rules on litigation discussions.

Even Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a staunch Trump ally who plans to join a group of at least 12 Republican senators in challenging Biden’s Electoral College win, offered a negative assessment of the president’s call on Monday.

“One of the things, I think, that everyone has said is that this call was not a helpful call,” she told Fox News.

Oooh, careful with such harsh criticism, Marsha.

On Capitol Hill, two House Democrats [Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.)] wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday morning, urging him to authorize a criminal investigation of Trump’s call with Raffensperger for potential violations of federal election fraud statutes.

[...]

The lawmakers also suggested that Trump violated Georgia laws against soliciting election fraud, and they said that if Wray agreed, he should formally refer the matter to the Georgia attorney general or a local district attorney.

At the very least. 

Also, I'm starting to wonder if Trump made that crazy call to deflect attention from the hacking of all those government agencies. That just dropped out of the news, and it could be the worst threat to national security in our history.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.