One of the most damning pieces of evidence concerning Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia is a phone call he made to Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, in which he demanded the secretary of state magically “find” the exact number of votes he needed to turn his loss to Joe Biden into a win. In fact, it was that call that initially inspired the Fulton County district attorney’s office to launch a criminal investigation into the ex-president. But as it turns out, that wasn’t the only call Trump made to local Georgia officials that has been of particular interest to prosecutors in the state.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported that the Fulton County special grand jury, which was impaneled last year and wrapped up its work in January, heard a recording of a call Trump made to David Ralston, the late Georgia House Speaker who died in November. According to several jurors who spoke to the outlet about the call, Trump asked Ralston to summon a special session of the state legislature to overturn Biden’s victory. The then Speaker was apparently not very receptive to the request. Ralston, one of the jurors told the AJC, “basically cut the president off. He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just basically took the wind out of the sails. ‘Well, thank you,’ you know, is all the president could say.”
Ralston was asked about the December 19, 2020, call in an interview one day later, in which he recounted that Trump made it clear he wanted “a special session of the Georgia General Assembly,” adding, “I shared with him my belief that, based on the understanding I have of Georgia law, that it was going to be very much an uphill battle.”
A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to the AJC’s request for comment.
As CNN notes, this is the third known recording of Trump pressuring a Georgia official to overturn the election in the state; in addition to Ralston and Raffensperger, Trump also pressured an investigator in the Georgia secretary of state’s office to look into election fraud, saying she would be “praised” for overturning Biden votes. Trump is also known to have asked Brian Kemp to convene a special session to invalidate Biden’s win and launch an audit of mail-in ballots (Kemp said no to the special session, and told Trump he didn’t have the authority to order an audit).
The special grand jury, which met for approximately seven months in Atlanta, recommended that the DA’s office bring criminal charges against unnamed individuals. In a report issued after the conclusion of their investigation, the grand jurors also wrote that they believed one or more witnesses may have lied to them. District Attorney Fani Willis is currently weighing indictments; Trump has, unsurprisingly, insisted he did nothing wrong and that the investigation into his conduct is a politically motivated witch hunt, a claim he is seemingly contractually obligated to make at least once every other day or else he dies.
In related news, during their conversation with The Atlanta Journal Constitution, one of the grand jurors said that in his under-oath testimony, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that Trump’s brain was so scrambled following his 2020 loss that “if somebody had told [him] that aliens came down and stole Trump ballots, that Trump would’ve believed it.”
