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      Trump Lawyer on Call Is a Conservative Firebrand Aiding His Push to Overturn Election

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      Georgia Runoff

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      To Defend Democracy, Investigate Trump's Georgia Call

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTo Defend Democracy, Investigate TrumpThere needs to be a cost to trying to overthrow an election.Opinion ColumnistJan. 4, 2021Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAccording to Title 52, Section 20511 of the United States Code, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” for federal office can be punished by up to five years in prison.Donald Trump certainly seems to have violated this law. He is on tape alternately cajoling and threatening Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to give him a winning margin in a state that he lost. He may have also broken federal conspiracy law and Georgia election law.“This is probably the most serious political crime I’ve ever heard of,” Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general for the Department of Justice, told me. “And yet there is the high likelihood that there will be no accountability for it.”At this point, demanding such accountability feels like smashing one’s head into a brick wall, but our democracy might not be able to stagger along much longer without it. Republicans already often treat victories by Democrats as illegitimate. Their justification for impeaching Bill Clinton was flimsy at the time and looks even more ludicrous in light of their defenses of Trump. Trump’s political career was built on the racist lie that Barack Obama was a foreigner ineligible for the presidency.Now Trump and his Republican enablers have set a precedent for pressuring state officials to discard the will of their voters, and if that fails, for getting their allies in Congress to reject the results.It isn’t working this time for several reasons. Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory wasn’t close. Republican state officials like Raffensperger behaved honorably. Democrats control the House, and some Senate Republicans retain a baseline commitment to democracy.None of those conditions are likely to be permanent, though. Minimally decent Republicans are particularly endangered. Expect Trumpists to mount primary challenges to them and replace them with cynics, cranks and fanatics.True democracy in America is quite new; you can date it to the civil rights era. If Trump’s Republican Party isn’t checked, we could easily devolve into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, in which elections still take place but the system is skewed to entrench autocrats.Some are trying to constrain Trump’s lawlessness. Two Democratic members of the House, Ted Lieu and Kathleen Rice, asked the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to open a criminal probe. In Atlanta, the Fulton County district attorney has expressed openness to bringing a case, saying, “Anyone who commits a felony violation of Georgia law in my jurisdiction will be held accountable.”But there is little appetite in the House for impeaching Trump again, though he transparently deserves it. (“We’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward,” Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said on Monday.) Joe Biden doesn’t seem to want his attorney general to investigate Trump, though he’s also said he wouldn’t stand in his or her way. And experts point to numerous reasons federal prosecutors might decline to bring a case.The first is what we might call the psychopath’s advantage: Prosecutors would have to prove that Trump knew that what he was doing was wrong. “You’re not dealing with your ordinary fraudster or your ordinary criminal or even your ordinary corrupt politician,” said Bromwich. “He seems to believe a lot of the lies that he’s telling.”There’s also the sheer political difficulty of prosecuting a former president. “My guess is that in the weeks and months that a prosecutor takes to develop a case like that, they’re at the end of the day going to say, ‘The guy’s not in office, nothing happened, we’re not spending our resources on it,’” the Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg told me. “Which doesn’t take away from the really immoral nature of the call.”Taken on their own, most excuses for not investigating or prosecuting Trump make at least some sense. Launching an impeachment less than three weeks before Biden’s inauguration might appear futile. It could even feed right-wing delusions by creating the impression that Democrats think Trump might be able to stay in office otherwise. Both the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress will be fully occupied dealing with the devastation to public health and the economy that Trump is leaving behind. Beyond its legal challenges, a federal prosecution of Trump would maintain his toxic grip on the country’s attention.Yet if there is no penalty for Republican cheating, there will be more of it. The structure of our politics — the huge advantages wielded by small states and rural voters — means that Democrats need substantial majorities to wield national power, so they can’t simply ignore the wishes of the electorate. Not so for Republicans, which is why they feel free to openly scheme against the majority.During impeachment, Republicans who were unwilling to defend the president’s conduct, but also unwilling to penalize him, insisted that if Americans didn’t like his behavior they could vote him out. Americans did, and now Trump’s party is refusing to accept it. It’s evidence that you can’t rely on elections to punish attempts to subvert elections. Only the law can do that, even if it’s inconvenient.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump is a buffoon – but the next aspiring autocrat won't be so incompetent | Richard Wolffe

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      Eleven Christmases ago, a student boarded a Northwest Airlines plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit with a singular mission.As the plane crossed the US border, he spent 20 minutes in the bathroom and then returned to his seat. There he tried to detonate his underwear, but only succeeded in burning his leg. The likely reason Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to kill almost 300 people was because he was sweating too much.The US has often been lucky that its enemies are too incompetent to detonate their own devices. But rather than relying on good fortune, successive presidents have spent trillions of dollars building a post-9/11 military order that is supposed to protect our freedoms.After listening to the outgoing president’s call with Georgia officials, it’s painfully clear that Donald Trump is the underwear bomber of our democracy. We are blessed to have such incompetent enemies, but the next assailant will not sweat quite so much, or so obviously. We cannot wait until someone comes along who knows how to light the fuse.How incompetent is the soon-to-be-ex-president? Trump wields the awesome power of the presidency with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer trying to crack a safe.“So what are we going to do here, folks,” he asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. You know, we have that in spades already. Or we can keep it going, but that’s not fair to the voters of Georgia because they’re going to see what happened, and they’re going to see what happened.”By “keeping it going” Trump meant he would wield his delusional sledgehammer on stage at his Georgia rally on Monday night, the day before the state’s crucial run-off elections that will determine which party controls the US Senate for the next two years.It’s not that Trump doesn’t try. Yoda says there is no try, but Trump really does try. He tries to sound precise with all the numbers of votes he dreams up. He tries to threaten the state election officials with unspecified crimes and political punishment.“Well, under law, you’re not allowed to give faulty election results, okay? You’re not allowed to do that. And that’s what you done. This is a faulty election result,” Trump warns his fellow Republican.“You should meet tomorrow because you have a big election coming up, and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam – and because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote. And a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative because they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected. Really respected, if this thing could be straightened out before the election.”One of the many challenges of this era is the distortion field that surrounds Donald Trump. Because he only cares for himself, and because he represents such a grotesque distortion of leadership, we focus on the individual. We try to understand his sociopathy and we talk about Trumpism, assuming it will all dissipate after inaugural day.But at this point, our concern should not focus on whether Trump and his allies can still derail Joe Biden’s inauguration: they can’t. Instead we should be deeply concerned about whether this cult can derail our democracy.Long after Trump shuffles down the ramp to his post-presidency, there will be another: a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz or a Tom Cotton. We won’t call their autocratic politics Trumpism, but they will be Trump-like.The roots of this ideology are deep and the network is extensive. At the end of this post-9/11 era, we are waking up to an insidious and far-reaching series of threats to our democracy and way of life. Some of its agents are directed by leaders like Trump; others are self-starting, independent actors. Some are inspired and organized internationally, but many are now home-grown.The racist, undemocratic wing of American politics moved briefly to the kooky fringes after the civil rights movement. But it burst back onto the main stage in the Obama years with the Tea party and its congressional outgrowth, the ironically-named Freedom Caucus. At the heart of the caucus were Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows – past and present chiefs of staff to one Donald Trump.It was Meadows who was polishing the turd as he teed up Trump’s call to Georgia’s state officials on Saturday.“What I’m hopeful for is there some way that we can, we can find some kind of agreement to look at this a little bit more fully,” Meadows ventured. “Mr Secretary, I was hopeful that, you know, in the spirit of cooperation and compromise, is there something that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that’s less litigious?”By less litigious, Meadows meant less engaged with those pesky judges who tossed out all those Trump campaign lawsuits. When Georgia’s secretary of state said the courts decide these issues, Trump himself sounded befuddled.“Why do you say that, though? I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, sure, we can play this game with the courts, but why do you say that?The funny thing about this Freedom Caucus ideology is that it doesn’t respect the freedom of the judicial branch.Trump was planning to award the presidential medal of freedom – the highest civilian honor – to another Freedom Caucus chair, Jim Jordan. And he was traveling to Georgia on Monday with yet another member, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who just happens to support the QAnon conspiracy.A dozen senators are now openly defying their leader, Mitch McConnell, by promising to challenge the votes of the electoral college this week. They will fail to stop Biden’s presidency, but they are succeeding in splitting their own party between Trumpist autocrats and conservative Republicans.McConnell should have seen the splinter-group threat of the Tea party from the outset but chose instead to keep them inside his tent. Now he faces the impossible task of pleasing people who are neither conservative nor supporters of the republic.It is easy to brush this kind of nonsense aside as some temporary fever that will surely break some day. Biden often sounds like he believes he can help administer some centrist medicine with a spoonful of personal charm.But autocratic politicians nowadays don’t dress in black or brown, and have learned how to sound occasionally normal. Hungary and Poland are still members of the EU. Turkey still has newspapers, just not nearly so many independent ones. Russia still has elections, but its opposition leaders tend to be either jailed or poisoned.The only reason American democracy survived 2020 is because of historic voter turnout, a handful of principled Republican election officials, and an independent judiciary. None of those factors are guaranteed to survive, and without one of them, the whole system would collapse.We don’t know precisely why so many former defense secretaries warned Trump and his supporters against involving the military in their last-gasp effort to destroy democracy and the 2020 election results. But we do know the general fear, and the name of the organizer: one Dick Cheney.It may seem weird that the man who led so many abuses of power in the post-9/11 era should seek to warn us about the abuses of power in the post-Trump era.But the underwear bomber was no less real for all of Cheney’s promotion of war and torture. And the threat to our democracy is no less real for all of Trump’s buffoonish attempts at autocracy. More

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      What Trump's call means for Georgia Senate races: Politics Weekly Extra

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      In a bonus episode ahead of one of the most influential moments for Joe Biden’s presidency before he’s even taken office, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith discuss a call made by the outgoing president to a state legislator in Georgia that could spell more trouble for Donald Trump.

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      Donald Trump has been recorded pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn US president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state, and it makes very interesting if not troubling listening. Polls will close in two senate seat runoff elections in Georgia on Tuesday. Jonathan and David try and figure out the impact such an explosive tape like this will have on the Republicans’ chances of victory. As we know, controversial, taped discussions involving Donald Trump don’t always make a difference. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Biden and Trump head to Georgia for dueling rallies ahead of Senate runoffs

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      Donald Trump and Joe Biden will stage dueling rallies in Georgia on the eve of two runoffs that will determine control of the Senate as the president continues his increasingly brazen effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
      Three million Georgia voters cast ballots during the early voting period, which ended Thursday – a record for runoff elections in the state. Tens of millions of dollars have poured into the state, as residents spent the last several weeks bombarded by political ads and outreach encouraging them to vote in Tuesday’s elections.
      If Democrats win both seats – no easy feat – the Senate would be evenly divided, with Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, serving as the tie-breaking vote. If Republicans win at least one of the races, Mitch McConnell will remain the Senate majority leader, making it far more difficult for the president-elect to deliver on top policy priorities such as healthcare, taxation and climate.
      Biden and Trump’s visits to the state on Monday highlight the urgency – and the stakes – of the twin races that will shape the political landscape for the first years of the incoming administration.
      Biden was the first Democratic presidential nominee in nearly three decades to win Georgia, where changing demographics and a political realignment across the Atlanta suburbs have turned this once reliably Republican southern state into a presidential battleground. Multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to amplify false claims about the state’s election process and its results.
      In an hour-long phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Saturday, Trump implored him to “find 11,780 votes” – just enough to reverse his defeat in the state’s presidential election.
      The conversation, a recording of which was first published by the Washington Post, may further damage Republicans, who were already nervous that Trump’s fixation on his electoral loss – based on meritless claims and debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud – could depress turnout among his supporters.
      The races have drawn firepower from some of the biggest names in American politics. In addition to Trump and Biden, Barack Obama narrated an ad for Jon Ossoff while Michelle Obama recorded a message for the Rev Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic contenders.
      Mike Pence was in Milner, Georgia on Monday to campaign on behalf of the Republican candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. The vice-president exhorted voters at Rock Springs church to turn up at the polls on Tuesday to protect the conservative victories Trump had achieved over the last four years.
      “We need Georgia to defend the majority,” he told said. “In one more day, we need people of faith to stand with two leaders who will support life and liberty and the freedom of every American. In one more day, we need to win Georgia and save America.”
      Pence’s visit came a day after Harris held a drive-in rally with the Democratic candidates Ossoff and Warnock in Savannah. In her remarks, Harris assailed Trump for his call with Georgia’s secretary of state, calling it a “bald-faced, bold abuse of power” and “most certainly the voice of desperation”.
      Loeffler is expected to appear with Trump at his Monday night rally in Dalton, a heavily Republican area in north Georgia that has seen relatively low turnout during the early voting period. Perdue, who is in quarantine after being exposed to a staff member with the coronavirus, told Fox News that he would attend Monday’s rally virtually.
      Since the November election, Trump has continued his sustained assault on Georgia’s Republican leaders, who he has accused without evidence of ignoring instances of voter fraud. He has relentlessly attacked Raffensperger, a Republican, who has resisted enormous pressure from the president and Republican leaders to subvert the election results. And last month, Trump called Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, a “fool” and said he should resign.
      Trump’s attacks have further cleaved the party at the very moment they would benefit from unity. During a rally in Georgia last month, Trump devoted considerably more time to airing his own political grievances with the state’s Republican leaders than promoting the Republican candidates he was there to campaign for.
      During his last visit to the state, Biden warned that Perdue and Loeffler would be “roadblocks” in the Senate, focused more on obstructing a Democratic administration than working to deliver for Georgia. A vote for Ossoff and Warnock, Biden said, was a “vote for two United States senators who know how to say the word ‘yes’ and not just ‘no’”.
      Perdue, who has served one term in the Senate, and Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat in December 2019, have largely embraced that characterization, warning voters that they are the last line of defense against a “radical liberal agenda”.
      In an appearance on Fox News on Monday, Perdue said he was doubtful the conversation between Trump and Raffensperger would have any impact on the election and appeared more dismayed that participants on the call would leak the recording, a decision he called “disgusting”.
      Perdue earlier said he supported an effort led by a group of Republican senators to indulge Trump’s desperate attempts to remain in power by objecting to the results of the elections in several states when Congress votes this week. “I’m encouraging my colleagues to object,” Perdue said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “This is something the American people demand right now.”
      Perdue’s term expired on Sunday and therefore will not vote on Wednesday, when Congress meets to certify the results of the Electoral College.
      Loeffler, who has made loyalty to Trump a central theme of her campaign, declined to answer the question directly. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Loeffler said she was “seriously looking” at the plot, backed by nearly a quarter of Senate Republicans, but did not commit to supporting it.
      “Everything is on the table,” she said. More

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      Republicans divided: Trump creates new splits as party frets about Georgia

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      Donald Trump has been marking the final days of his presidency by creating new fissures within the Republican party, at a time when the GOP needs to unify if it is to win two races in Georgia, which will decide control of the Senate.To the dismay of some senior Republicans, Trump has continued to make baseless claims of having won the 2020 election – which he lost to Joe Biden – and to stoke conspiracy theories among his enthusiastic supporters.But Trump’s move has won the approval of a significant chunk of his party’s elected officials, leading to the kind of open split which never meaningfully materialized during his four years in office.“This is a time when the party should be unifying around opposition to Biden’s agenda,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Instead, Trump is continuing to divide Republicans in a way that really weakens their political hand. Biden’s the real winner in all of this because his opposition is more divided than ever.”Republicans have wanted Trump to zero in on a message that will boost Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, running for re-election to their Georgia Senate seats. Instead, Trump’s interactions with Georgia Republicans and voters have focused on his grievances and unfounded claims of fraud.The president ramped that up on Saturday in an hour-long call with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the top elections official in the state and a Republican himself. The president implored Raffensperger to find more votes for him, even though though the election is over and recounts and investigations found Biden won.“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state,” Trump said.The call was recorded by officials in Raffensperger’s office and first reported by the Washington Post.Raffensperger resisted, fueling the president’s frustration and widening the gap between top members of the party who are going to whatever lengths possible to try and keep the president in the White House, and those who think such efforts do more harm than good.As the president has fumed, other Republicans have been fretting about the party’s prospects in Georgia. Turnout is already high and Republican and Democratic operatives in the state expect a razor-thin margin of victory.Biden won the state in November, ending years of Republican dominance in major elections. That victory has fueled hopes among Democrats that they can win both Senate races and thus control the Senate. Pessimism is high among Republicans, who fear party disunity will only help Democrats.Whatever the outcome in Georgia, Trump’s desperate efforts have divided Republicans in Congress.About a dozen senators and a significant number of House Republicans are planning to fight certification of Biden’s victory this week in Congress. That effort is expected to fail. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chair of the House Republican Conference, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and others have argued that that push is doomed and will cause lasting damage.“This is directly at odds with the constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans,” Cheney wrote in a 20-page memo laying out her opposition to the anti-certification move.Trump has lashed out at such Republicans speaking out against the effort to save him. He has gone so far as to call for Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run a primary campaign against Thune, the second-highest-ranking Senate Republican, in 2022.Notably, two of the senators leading the charge are prospective 2024 presidential candidates: Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.Cruz is known for bucking Republican leadership. The advantage for these two senators in fighting the certification is that it could engineer goodwill among the pro-Trump base of the party. That could be highly valuable as they try to move the party on from Trump without appearing to oppose him or the possibility that he might run again himself.“These senators that have joined this Cruz effort are clearly motivated by a mix of 2024 ambitions and 2022 primary concerns, neither of which is going to slow down the Democrats’ agenda for a second,” Conant said.Matt Gorman, another Republican strategist, stressed that Trump and the GOP would be better served by focusing only on winning the Senate races in Georgia.“What is crucial to Georgia is Republican turnout in the ruby red parts of the state,” Gorman said. “Therefore you need President Trump to be invested in this. That’s where he’s going. He needs to convince that base that regardless of how you feel about his election, this election is important and you need to go vote. That is bar none crucial.”Trump was due to address a rally in Dalton, Georgia on Monday night. More

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      Democrats ask FBI to investigate Trump's Georgia phone call

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      Two Democrats have asked the FBI to open a criminal investigation into Donald Trump over a phone call in which he pressured Georgia state officials to overturn the presidential election in his favour.
      The US president berated and begged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top election official, to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in the state, according to an audio recording made public on Sunday.
      The revelation prompted fierce debate over whether the call violated federal statutes that prohibit interference in elections. Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York, in the House of Representatives, demanded a case be opened.
      “As members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes,” they wrote to FBI director Christopher Wray. “We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the president.”
      Under US law, it is a crime to “knowingly and willfully” deprive voters of a free or fair election. Eric Holder, a former attorney general, tweeted: “As you listen to the tape consider this federal criminal statute.”
      During the hour-long call on Saturday, Trump asserted disproven claims of fraud and raised the vague prospect of a “criminal offence” if the Georgia secretary of state and other officials did not change the certified vote count.
      “All I want to do is this,” the president said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
      Raffensperger, a Republican, pointed out that Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by 11,779 votes. “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions,” he said. “We don’t agree that you have won.”
      Trump insisted: “I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia.” He pushed conspiracy theories circulating in rightwing media, including that hundreds of thousands of ballots mysteriously appeared in Fulton county, which includes Atlanta. Officials have said there is no evidence of this.

      Interviewed on ABC, Raffensperger said: “It was pretty obvious pretty early on that we’d debunked every one of those theories early on but President Trump continues to believe them.”
      The White House had reportedly made 18 attempts to call Raffensperger during the past two months before he relented. Raffensperger said he did so against his better judgment.
      “He did most of the talking, we did most of the listening,” he said. “But I do want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong. He had hundreds and hundreds of people he said that were dead that voted. We found two. That’s an example of just his bad data.”
      Asked if he considered Trump’s request to be lawful, the secretary of state replied: “I’m not a lawyer. All I know is that we’re gonna follow the law, follow the process. Truth matters, and we’ve been fighting these rumours for the last two months.”
      Trump may have violated Georgia state laws by soliciting election fraud. Raffensperger said: “I understand that the Fulton county district attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue for it to go.”
      Fani Willis, the Fulton DA, said on Monday she found Trump’s call “disturbing” and if referred the case would “enforce the law without fear or favour”.
      State law is not subject to the presidential pardon power, which Trump has recently used for allies and which some observers think he may try to apply to himself.
      As with so many past outrages, Republicans did not condemn. Kevin McCarthy, the party’s leader in the House, told Fox News: “The president’s always been concerned about the integrity of the election, and the president believes that there are things that happened in Georgia that he wants to see accountability for.”
      The incident echoed a 2019 call in which Trump tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden by withholding military support. That led to impeachment by the House and acquittal by the Senate but a repeat seems unlikely just two weeks before Trump leaves office.
      Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No 2 Democrat in the Senate, said Trump’s conduct “merits nothing less than a criminal investigation”.
      Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, told MSNBC: “It is unprecedented. It is the most consequential attack on American democracy in the history of our country … This is what mafia does … This is beyond outrageous. This is not only impeachable, it is certainly a criminal offence.”
      The revelations fuelled anxiety that Trump will stop at nothing to cling to power. All 10 living former secretaries of defense published a joint article in the Washington Post warning that the military should not be used to change the outcome of the election.

      The tape also threatened to upend runoff elections in Georgia that will determine control of the Senate. Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have backed Trump. Party infighting could lead some voters to stay home in protest.
      Georgia would not be enough to tilt the election to Trump. Biden won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7 million. A dozen senators and more than 100 Republicans in the House plan to object when Congress meets to certify the results on Wednesday.
      Trump continued to rail against members unwilling to join the effort, tweeting: “The ‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!”
      For two months Trump has been claiming his loss to Biden was the result of fraud. Numerous reviews have rejected those claims and dozens of lawsuits have failed.
      Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump, tweeted: “Georgia voters, along with a clear majority of Americans, chose Joe Biden to be their president. Trump can’t change that, no matter how many oaths he breaks.” More