In January, the Washington Post published a “bombshell” story alleging that in a December phone call, President Donald Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the fraud” in the 2020 election and said that he’d be a “national hero” if he did.
Many on the Left interpreted the quote to mean Trump was pressuring Raffensperger to illegally find votes to overturn the results. The Washington Post even suggested the call itself could constitute obstruction of justice.
The Washington Post has now issued a major correction to the original story after a recording of the call proved Trump never said such things.
“Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting that she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now,’” the correction reads.
Here is the entire correction to the original story:
Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.
Another phone call between Trump and Raffensperger in January was recorded and leaked to the media, but state officials claimed that they didn’t believe a recording of the December call existed. However, “officials located the recording on a trash folder on [investigator Frances] Watson’s device while responding to a public records request, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal process.”
So, Georgia officials admitted that they made a recording of the call, then they claimed there wasn’t one, and then they said they found a recording in a trash folder. Did the Washington Post make up the fake quotes or did someone in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office make them up? Or perhaps it was collusion between them? Someone had to make up the fake quotes.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.
