President Trump’s Call to Georgia Secretary of State and US Federal & State Law

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US President Donald Trump may have violated both US federal and state law in his controversial taped phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state. He asked Republican Brad Raffensperger in the hour-long call to help him to find 11,780 votes to overturn his loss to Joe Biden. The state and election officials informed President Trump they could not help him because Biden’s win had been fair and accurate. Experts believe that Trump’s specific request to find a certain number of votes to overturn Biden’s win and his vague reference that Raffensperger and his officials could face criminal liability could violate laws designed to prevent solicitation of election fraud. Point to be noted that Georgia state law has 2 provisions that make criminal solicitation of election fraud and conspiracy to commit election fraud.

The US federal law also makes criminal the procurement, casting, tabulation, or ballots known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent. Any violation of state law would not be subject to a pardon from Trump or his successor. A Georgia State University law professor, Anthony Michael Kreis said, “The Georgia code says that anybody who solicits, requests or commands or otherwise attempts to encourage somebody to commit election fraud is guilty of solicitation of election fraud. Soliciting or requesting is the key language. The president asked, in no uncertain terms, the secretary of state to invent votes, to create votes that were not there”. The former Justice Department inspector general, Michael R Bromwich also attacked Trump’s call.

Bromwich said, “There’s just no way that if you read the code and the way the code is structured, and then you look at what the president of the United States requested that he has not violated this law the spirit of it for sure”. A former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said, “The Trump tapes sound like a mob boss giving orders to a lieutenant. Trump tells the Georgia Secretary of State to find the exact number of votes he needs to flip the results. This sounds exactly like what we would catch our RICO defendants saying when we were up on a wire”. Democrats in Washington DC were quick to say they viewed it as a potential criminal act after the call became public.