Donald Trump, together with his faithful lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman plus the supporters who supported them, exerted strong pressure and serious threats against officials and senior officials from Arizona and Georgia, among other states, to manipulate the voting in their territories and from In this way they made possible the cancellation of the presidential elections of November 2020.
This was reported this Tuesday by prominent representatives of the Republican Party, all of them resistant victims of such pressures in both states, before the Congressional committee that is investigating the attempted coup against democracy culminating in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The hearing began with a powerful statement from the Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers. The parliamentarian, who campaigned for Trump and voted for him, denied the former president's claim that at one point he recognized that the election results were fraudulent. "It is totally untrue that I said the voting was rigged," Bowers said at the start.
The veteran Arizona politician recalled how Trump's then-lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told him in a call with the then-president that 200,000 undocumented immigrants and "5,000 or 6,000 dead people" had voted in the election illegally, and why so much had to be discounted tens of thousands of papers in favor of Joe Biden. Bowers asked the lawyer for evidence, but Giuliani "never provided it."
The president's lawyer even proposed to Bowers that, without further ado, he change the state's intermediary electors - those who proclaim the state vote based on the results at the polls - to designate Trump supporters who would alter the result. The president of the House also refused. He indicated that doing what Giuliani asked would amount to "betraying my oath to the Constitution," and he would never do that. "I didn't want to be used as a pawn," he told the committee.
After his refusal, Trump supporters began harassing Bowers and his family outside his home. The protesters shouted insulting insults at him, argued with neighbors and accused him of being a pedophile and a pervert, he said. At least one of the rioters displayed a gun. "It was very disturbing," said the witness, very affected. His daughter was "very sick", he recalled, and in fact would die a few weeks later, in January 2021
Bowers' office received "more than 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of "voice and text messages" with complaints and threats for refusing what Trump asked of him. "We couldn't work," he said.
Something similar happened to the person in charge of supervising the elections in Georgia from his position as Secretary of State, also Republican Brad Raffensperger. "After the election, my email, my cell phone was revealed, so I received text messages all over the country. Then also my wife started receiving text messages, many of them sexualized and disgusting. And some people they broke into my daughter-in-law's house. My son passed away and she is a widow with two children; we are also very concerned about her safety," he testified.
In a previously widely publicized call, Trump called on Raffensperger to alter the presidential results exactly as he instructed: “All I want is to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we have won the state,” Trump told Raffensperger in a tense dialogue that he recorded and made public.
The senior official did not throw in the towel "because he knew that we had followed the law and the Constitution, and there are times that require you to stand up and do your job. That's all we did," he said.
Nor did Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, escape Trump's wrath, whose "stomach sank" when she heard the mob for Trump outside her home after her refusal to cooperate with the president's manipulations. "It was scary," she said.
The same thing happened to Bryan Cutler, president of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, who first received calls from Giuliani and, when he saw that he hit the bone, he also suffered the pressure of the hordes obedient to the Republican leader. In his case, they were presented to him when his 15-year-old son was home alone.
Poll worker Wandrea ArShaye Moss, a black woman from Georgia, received death threats and racist taunts, including from Giuliani, after Trump claimed that she and her mother rigged the election with “vote bags” — a false claim that State and federal investigators dismissed it, he recalled, with Trump's attorney comparing Moss to "a small-time drug dealer."
Moss's mother and running mate Ruby Freeman recounted how she had to leave her home when the President's supporters unleashed their attack on her. Some of the messages from her that she received from her asked to hang up.
"Can you imagine what it's like to be targeted by the most powerful man in the world? There's nowhere I feel safe," Freeman lamented. "He attacked me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who wanted to help Fulton County hold an election in the midst of a pandemic."
The committee will resume its sessions on Thursday.
Trump's responsibility in the greatest attack on American democracy is now beyond doubt. The scope of that responsibility remains to be determined. And, above all, he is yet to know to what extent Congress and, above all, the US Justice system will manage to make him pay for it.
