Georgia senator facing runoff cool with Trump bullying election officials

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), rebuked criticism offered by his fellow Republicans of Donald Trump’s effort on a phone call to intimidate Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to throw the election in Trump’s favor.

Fox News anchor Sandra Smith noted criticism from former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and current Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) of Trump’s activities.

Instead of accepting the criticism, Perdue instead made a grandiose claim that “a lot of people in Georgia and 75 million Americans … align with” Trump’s baseless assertions of election fraud in Georgia.

Perdue went on to praise his previous attempts to have Raffensperger removed from his position when he would not bend to Trump’s will.

“We have pulled out all the stops to try to fight with the president to get the right accounting,” Perdue said, summarizing his campaign’s efforts.

Georgia has repeatedly certified the election results in favor of a Joe Biden victory and an audit of the election did not show evidence of fraud or irregularities as Perdue and Trump allege.

Nonetheless, Perdue said that the state Legislature should not have certified the result.

“I don’t believe that we should have certified this election yet,” he told Fox.

From the Jan. 4 edition of Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom”:

SANDRA SMITH, Fox News: So, then you’re not seeing what Jonathan Turley saw when he said it was
“absolutely breathtaking” to hear the president use the words, use the words, “I just want to find the 11,780 votes.” He’s a constitutional law professor.

 

Ari Fleischer said, “pretty much everything the president said on that call was wrong.” He used to be the press secretary for George Bush. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, called what the president did there on pressuring the secretary of state “absolutely appalling.”

 

So, sir, you’ve reacted to the leaking of that call, and the actual taping of it, got it. But what about the contents of that call?

 

DAVID PERDUE: Well, however he said it, Sandra, what he’s saying a lot of people in Georgia and 75 million Americans, I think, align with him right now that something untoward happened here in Georgia and we have not gotten to the bottom of it.

 

Right away, I asked the secretary of state for some things that didn’t happen, we called for his resignation, and we asked for a special session of the general assembly to investigate, that didn’t happen. So, we went to court, they told us it was a legislative issue and so, we have pulled out all the stops to try to fight with the president to get the right accounting.

 

Look, I missed this runoff by just a few thousand votes myself, we beat our opponent by two percent. In every other state but one, we would already be reelected.

 

We know the probability of the low number of absentee ballots that were rejected is 1 in 10,000. That’s the probability that you would have numbers like we had in Georgia in November, so, until somebody looks at that, I’ve been calling for weeks to object to the electors because in the state of Georgia, I don’t believe that we should have certified this election yet.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.