President Donald Trump is facing a string of calls for a second impeachment after a phone call to Georgia's election chief pressuring him to overturn his election defeat was released over the weekend.
In a taped conversation released by The Washington Post on Sunday, Mr Trump is apparently heard asking Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” and help overturn the election loss.
The call has sparked an immediate widespread backlash from lawyers, politicians, and members of the public, with many saying his actions warrant a second impeachment before Mr Trump leaves office.
Democratic New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among those quick to criticise the president, saying that he should be “quickly” sanctioned for the incident.
"I absolutely think it's an impeachable offence, and if it was up to me, there would be articles on the floor quite quickly,” AOC said as the new session of Congress opened.
However, the progressive lawmaker was far from the only politician to hit out at the president in the hours following the release of the conversation.
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin described the tape as “more than a pathetic rambling, delusional rant” which “merits nothing less than a criminal investigation," he said on Sunday.
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Georgia Democratic Lawmaker Hank Johnson also insisted that the recording marks “a violation of state and federal law”, outlining his plans to “introduce a resolution of Censure” against the president.
The backlash comes only weeks before Mr Trump’s term in office draws to a close, with the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden set to take place on 20 January.
Social media users, political action committee’s and political watchdogs all expressed views that Mr Trump should not avoid legal action just because he has limited days left in office.
“Trump should obviously be immediately impeached and removed for the Georgia call, right? We're just not pushing it because he'll be gone in a couple of weeks?,” Political TV and radio show host, David Pakman, said.
Washington watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, echoed similar sentiments on Sunday, accusing the president of attempting to “rig a presidential election.”
"While the logistics of holding impeachment proceedings in the final two weeks of a presidency are admittedly hard to pull off, if this isn't impeachable conduct, then literally nothing is," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. "Congress must act immediately."
The Lincoln Project, an Anti-Trump Republican Political Action Committee, called the “full 60-minute audio” of the tapes “Exhibit A of Individual 1 in his own words.”
During the shocking call, Mr Raffensperger and his officials told the outgoing president that Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
"There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated,” the president purortedly said in the call, telling Mr Raffensperger that he was taking “a big risk” in not pursuing his false claims.
Certain legal experts have branded the audio “potentially criminal” and insisted that the actions amount to an “impeachable offence”.
“Pressuring an election official to 'find’ the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, and another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot,” congressman Adam Schiff, a lawyer who led the impeachment proceedings against the president, tweeted.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, suggested that the president “may have also subjected himself to additional criminal liability.”
NBC’s legal analyst, Neal Katyal, said Mr Trump was “talking like a mafia boss” called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the conversation.
The demands for action to once again be taken against the president come almost a year since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi approved articles of impeachment for the president in 2019.
Republican Sen Susan Collins, who voted to acquit Mr Trump in the impeachment trial saying she believed “that the president has learned from this case” joined a bipartisan group of Senators in releasing a statement on the upcoming certification of results on Sunday.
“The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted,” the letter posted on Twitter read.
“At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans’ confidence in the already determined election results.”
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci described the scandal on CNN on Sunday as “rank lawlessness happening domestically” saying the president "needs to be impeached again.”
The reaction also comes just one day before two run-off elections are scheduled to take place in Georgia in a contentious battle to decide which party takes control of the Senate.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will face Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in two elections on 5 January after no clear winner was determined in the races in November.
Democrats need to secure both seats in the election to tie with Republican incumbents, giving Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris the deciding vote whenever there is a 50-50 tie in the Senate.
Ms Harris herself weighed in on the tape's release on Sunday, branding it a “bald, bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president of the United States.”
Jackpot777 on January 4th, 2021 at 15:01 UTC »
I just want to add, because I haven't seen it anywhere, what Trump did in the call. It's called Grician Implecature. H. P. Grice developed the theory to explain and predict conversational implicatures, and describe how they arise and are understood.
But that all sounds very academic and dry. So where does this involve Trump, or a crime?
Glad you asked.
You know, because of the implication.
This is not the first time Trump's use of implicature has been noticed by linguistic experts. Take it away, Abbey Ehrhard at the Department of Linguistics at University of Colorado Boulder...
What did Trump say?
In mentioning what he wants, he also mentioned that someone has a lovely daughter as well as their own self. A very young lovely daughter. Should these people, especially the very young lovely daughter (the daughter of a Georgia elections employee, who became a target of Trump’s legal team) or the other people on the call or ...well, anyone really be worried in Georgia if Trump doesn't get what he wants?
Trump needs the votes. And people are angry. He can say things like "Liberate" a state and armed people will be on the streets. He's done it before. Angry people all over the country. On Monday. And that person, they have a lovely daughter...
I mean, it's not as though he's asking the Republicans in Georgia to GIVE him votes out of thin air, from a meeting instead of from votes counted from ballot boxes, is it?
Atlanta is in Fulton County. He actually said "and you wouldn't give it to us" about a county with a 46.4% white population which is one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the entire nation. It has voted Democratic in every presidential election but two since 1876.
You know. Just meet up. Specifically for an exact number of votes.
Or keep it going, really run the tally up ...you know what, that's not fair of me because if you do that they’re going to see what happened, and they’re going to see what happened. Let's just say the bare minimum. You can do the bare minimum, right? Find me the votes. From At-fucking-lanta. Just find them. In the meeting. Because of angry people. We "won" the state but just "find" what is needed. For me. By the way, [name redacted] has a lovely young daughter. A very lovely young lady I'm sure...
Do you know how many times he mentions the 11,779 votes he lost by?
Eleven. Eleven times in this one call.
Lock him up.
TheBirminghamBear on January 4th, 2021 at 14:39 UTC »
Impeach the motherfucker again.
For fuck's sake this is such an easy call. Impeach him again and let Republicans once more vote to keep this treasonous fucking piece of shit in office because they're too fucking greedy for the support of his rabid fanbase to do the right thing.
Let them go on record exonerating, for a second time, a sack of dogshit that let 350,000 Americans die while working overtime to overthrow the democratic results of an election.
Force them to greenlight a few short miserable weeks of this petulant child's continued tantrum while representing the highest office in America, and let them truly demonstrate how fucking far they've let this country sink on their watch.
EDIT:
I see a lot of people asking, "But what's the point, what will it accomplish, Republicans will just block it, he's almost out of office", and so on, and so on.
The point is impeachment is what you are supposed to do when a President commits treason.
Donald Trump lost an election and, while still sitting US President, called a state's secretary of state and demanded he find additional votes that would allow Donald Trump to win that state.
The bar for impeachment, per our constitution, doesn't say, "for high crimes and misdemeanors.... unless he doesn't have much time left in office".
It doesn't say, "for high crimes and misdemeanors... unless his party will block his removal in the Senate.
If an elected official commits impeachable offenses, you fucking impeach them. That's our constitution. That is the law that all of us agreed to. You don't get a free pass on treason just because you don't have much longer on the job. You cannot establish the precedent that an attempted coup is OK just because it's unlikely to succeed and because the guy attempting it only has a few weeks left.
You do not abdicate your duty merely because others have abdicated theirs. Let Republicans be forced to be the ones to exonerate him again. Do not avoid the right thing merely because you know they intend to do the wrong thing. Act. Force them to demonstrate their complicity in the coup.
This is a fucking coup attempt. Yes Donald Trump is a fucking dimwit, but if you give him a free pass to attempt to overthrow the US government and install himself as an unelected tyrant, what happens when the next lame duck pulls the same shit and no impeachment articles are filed simply because "well he doesn't have much longer left".
Yes, of course Donald Trump doesn't have much longer in office... that's why he's desperately attempting a fucking coup.
You need to look beyond the simple removal of Trump. We are in a historic moment. A terribly moment, but a historic moment, nontheless. The perception of this moment is shaped by what people do or say now.
If Trump can commit treason without impeachment because there's just one month left in his term, is it OK for a President to do it with three months left? Do we not impeach at all if it seems like the President's party controlling the Senate will just... cover for him?
Is anything a lame duck President does now exempt from removal from office?
Think about that exceedingly slim, totally bullshit recommendation letter that the DoJ used to establish the precedent that a sitting US President couldn't be charged of any crime.
A thin, almost transparently meaningless piece of paper from decades ago. And yet we've accepted it. No one has filed criminal charges against Donald Trump. Precedent has been set. Precedent can be used to argue in the courts, and in the court of public opinion, and in the halls of the House and Senate.
You need to understand that there are larger forces at work here. Forces that are shaping precedent as we speak. We must take action. It doesn't matter if that action will likely not accomplish the short term goal of removing this President from office. We must not let such an egregious, virtually unprecedented corruption of our process stand with no ramifications.
A President does this and we impeach him immediately. Every time. It doesn't matter what else is going on in the world. The context ought to be irrelevant in situations such as these.
And let me remind you, this is not the first egregious overreach by Donald Trump. He's been doing this before and after the election. A day doesn't go by now without Donald Trump attempting to sabotage Democracy.
He needs to be held accountable to the highest extent to which we can hold him accountable in this moment. If that doesn't remove him from office, so be it. It needs to be established that this country will not accept this treasonous behavior from a leader. And if Republicans want to once again exonerate him, then that must be their burden to bear, due to actions they themselves have taken.
Enough of this fucking bullshit from these treasonous shits. Put this on record, lay down the law, and follow our constitution.
ItsKeithAskins on January 4th, 2021 at 14:39 UTC »
It’s an attempted coup. It’s that simple. That’s where we are as a country.
It’s Trump, and it’s Republicans standing by silently tacitly approving of the behavior. They’re ok with the coup so long as it doesn’t harm their ability to retain power.