Lost recording of Trump pressuring a Georgia election official was uncovered in an investigator's trash folder, report says
By Joshua Zitser
A six-minute phone call between former President Donald Trump and a Georgian election official was published on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.
Trump used the December conversation to pressure Frances Watson, the investigations supervisor to the Georgia Secretary of State, to find nonexistent examples of voter fraud before "the very important date" of January 6, the paper reported.
It was previously believed that a recording of his phone call did not exist, The Washington Post reported in January.
Officials, however, recently located the recording in Watson's trash folder when responding to a public records request, an unnamed person familiar with the incident told The Post.
In the conversation between Trump and Watson, the former president asked her to look into the "dishonesty" at Fulton County. He also claimed that his campaign "won by hundreds of thousands of votes."
Fulton County, a heavily Democratic jurisdiction, voted for Biden in the 2020 election. There is no evidence of widespread fraud there.
Trump lost Georgia by over 11,000 votes, an outcome that was certified after ballots were counted three times.
In the call, Trump also told Watson that she would be "praised" when "the right answer comes out."
The conversation preceded Trump's infamous chat with Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked him to "find" additional votes to overturn President Joe Biden's win.
A criminal investigation into this conversation and Trump's efforts to "influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia General Election" was opened in Fulton County last month.
Raffensperger also initiated a "fact-finding inquiry" into the phone call last month, The New York Times reported.
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