Brad Raffensperger pointedly declined to say anything illegal occurred in call or that he was threatened to take any specific action.
A year later, a now-infamous call between President Trump and his advisers with Georgia election regulators is still generating attention, with even a local prosecutor and the Jan. 6 commission in Congress inquiring whether the call violated any laws.
But the man on the receiving end of the call — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — says looking back he views the call as “just a conversation” in which he conveyed to the 45th president that allegations about election irregularities in Georgia simply were not supported by the facts.
In an interview with Just the News, Raffensperger pointedly declined to say anything threatening or illegal happened on the call, though he previously has claimed in a book he took the call as a threat.
“Well, it’s pretty obvious what the president wanted,” Raffensperger said during an interview aired Tuesday on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “We all want to win. I get that.”
Recounting many of the allegations Trump and his allies mentioned on the call — from thousands of dead or underage voters to illegal ballots mysteriously appearing in the Atlanta voting center — Raffensperger said every claim was evaluated and probed by his office, the FBI or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and none could be corroborated, with many being outright debunked.
Trump allies, for instance, claimed there were 10,000 or more ballots cast by deceased people. An audit, in fact, found only four.
“So I settled that,” Raffensperger said. “And I know there is a lot of urban legends out there. But I look at what President Trump wanted. And it’s just obvious that his people really filled him with a lot of misinformation and falsehoods. And maybe perhaps they believed it. But it was never supported by the facts.”
Raffensperger, however, did reveal a new election integrity issue his office is investigating right now: an allegation of systematic ballot harvesting during the state’s 2020 general election and subsequent U.S. Senate runoff contests. He said he may soon issue subpoenas to secure critical evidence in that probe.
The allegations came from a conservative voter integrity group called True the Vote and include video footage of people stuffing ballots into drop boxes, smartphone geospatial data showing possible ballot couriers near the drop boxes and statements from one man who told the group he participated in the illegal ballot-gathering scheme along with others and nonprofit groups, according to the group’s complaint.
Raffensperger’s office is particularly interested in the potential witness, identified in the complaint as John Doe, and has launched a full investigation.
“If people give us, you know, credible allegations, we want to make sure that we do that,” Raffensperger told Just the News. “And we have that right now as an ongoing investigation.”
By John Solomon
