Jon Ossoff Slams Trump’s Call with Georgia Sec of State as a ‘Direct Attack On Our Democracy’
Democratic Georgia Senate candidate Jon Ossoff slammed President Donald Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as a “direct attack on our democracy,” and criticized his state’s two incumbent Republican Senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, for failing to defend Georgia from the president’s attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election.
The audio recording of the phone call showed the president repeatedly berating Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel, making a series of baseless claims of election fraud, and demanding that they help him “find 11,780 votes” so as to flip President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in their state.
CNN’s Ana Cabrera played a clip of Ossoff speaking on the campaign trail, reacting to the news about the phone call.
Ossoff denounced “this moment, when the President of the United States calls up Georgia’s election officials and tries to intimidate them to change the result of the elections, to disenfranchise Georgia voters, to disenfranchise black voters in Georgia, who delivered this state for Joe Biden and [Vice President-elect] Kamala Harris.”
“That is a direct attack on our democracy,” Ossoff continued, “and if David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler had one piece of steel in their spines, one shred of integrity, they would be out here defending Georgia voters from that kind of assault.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution political reporter Greg Bluestein told Cabrera he thought this news “could further depress Republican turnout,” especially moderate Republicans who were turned off by Trump’s behavior, and could encourage higher Democratic turnout, because it “plays into the argument” pushed by both Ossoff and the other Democratic candidate, Raphael Warnock, that Georgia’s Republican Senators were “putting loyalty to Trump over the good of Georgians.”
Bluestein also noted that “three separate tallies of 5 million votes in Georgia” had confirmed Biden’s win, including an audit of the signatures on Cobb County absentee ballots that showed “no evidence of any voter fraud either.”
“So at every turn, the state elections officials — Republican state elections officials, I should add — have been rebuking the president, along with Governor Brian Kemp, along with Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, saying they can’t overturn the election results just because the president is demanding they do so,” Bluestein concluded.
Watch the video above, via CNN.
