Donald Trump’s attempts to revise history in Wednesday’s CNN town hall took an outrageous turn when he denied pressuring a Georgia election official to “find” him votes. (Watch the video below.)
The former president, who sought to overturn the 2020 election results in that swing state to bolster his lie that his defeat was rigged, was caught on tape telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state and flipping the state is a great testament to our country.”
When CNN host Kaitlan Collins suggested indictments would be forthcoming for Trump’s alleged Georgia election strong-arming, Trump said he questioned the election and insisted the call was “normal” and “perfect.”
“You asked him to find you votes,” Collins said.
“I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Trump said.
Collins: “We’ve heard the audiotape, Mr. President. There’s an audio of you asking him to find you 11,000-something votes.”
Trump: “I said you owe me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged. And if this call was bad, why didn’t him and his lawyers hang up? How dare you say that? This was a perfect phone call.”
Trump continued to dodge and Collins reminded him there was no evidence of vote fraud in Georgia.
Trump, the Republican front-runner for 2024, spent the night revisiting his falsehoods about the 2020 election and his role in fomenting a violent attempt to overturn his loss at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The former president was recently indicted for a hush-money payoff to a porn star and found liable in a lawsuit for sexually abusing a woman at a department store. In addition to the criminal probe in Georgia, the U.S. attorney general is investigating Trump for the insurrection and for mishandling classified documents he took to Mar-a-Lago.