It made national news this week when The Washington Post and other media outlets admitted that the account of then-President Donald Trump’s leaked call to a Georgia elections investigator was based on false quotes. Another Trump phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was also leaked to undermine those opposed to the secretary’s election oversight— and the mainstream media is accused of getting that wrong too…
Much of the spin from Democrats and their media allies over the calls was about Trump saying he needed the secretary of state to “find” votes. This was always framed as Trump asking the secretary of state to somehow commit fraud. The claim was even included in the Democrats’ article of impeachment that went nowhere.
Many observers who listened to the tape argue that Trump was saying his team had already “found” nearly 150,000 irregular or fraudulent votes and simply needed Raffensperger to investigate further and agree. The president said they didn’t need to “find” that all 150,000 were bad, just that fewer than 10 percent were invalid.
Yet the secretary of state’s office kept repeating to the media that Trump’s figures were wrong. And Raffensberger’s people would not share their data with Georgia’s Trump legal team.
Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, stands accused of being responsible for both of those phone call tape leaks, and The Washington Post said she agreed to be named as the source of the quotes on the former call. Indeed, Fuchs has been a “Never-Trumper” Republican, which especially caused a lot of problems throughout 2020 with the Trump-Pence campaign and many Republicans statewide.
Molly Hemingway of The Federalist writes: “Fuchs’s Twitter account isn’t quite as unhinged as Jen Rubin’s or Bill Kristol’s, but it’s pretty close. There are few Never-Trumpist arguments she avoids, and she shares the media’s newfound talking point that election fraud is a ‘big lie.’ It doesn’t exactly build confidence that she knows what she’s doing, is able to separate her emotions from her work, or is capable of understanding legitimate complaints with how she manages elections.”
Hemingway continues, “Raffensberger’s office finally said, after that infamous phone call, that they’d share state data and information ‘on the condition’ that the Trump team drop their lawsuit. They agreed to that. Instead of turning over the data that would settle the issue, Fuchs and Raffensberger issued a press release that said, “on the eve of getting the day in court they supposedly were begging for, President Trump and Chairman David Shafer’s legal team folded Thursday and voluntarily dismissed their election contests against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rather than submit their evidence to a court and to cross-examination. It showed just how political Raffensberger and Fuchs are. While the media strongly support Raffensberger, at least until such time as a Republican wins in Georgia again, the concern about the integrity of the election remains.”
Hemingway concludes, “Perhaps Raffensberger is completely and totally correct. But it would behoove him to share the data that proves that rather than issue antagonistic and uncharitable press releases while sitting on the information that could settle the issue. As for the media, they’re doing what they always do — advancing a political agenda. Believing their characterization of lawsuits, phone calls, or anything else they report on is unwise. But it wasn’t just the quotes they got wrong about Georgia. It was pretty much everything.”
