The NPR Politics Podcast - Republican Officials Detail Trump's Effort To Subvert Presidential Election Results

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

The officials who appeared before the Jan. 6 committee were Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer Gabriel Sterling — all Republicans who indicated then-President Trump pushed them to violate their obligations to the Constitution.The committee also heard from Shaye Moss, a former staff election worker in Georgia who was targeted by Trump and his allies over baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. She left her job as racist attacks and threats against her safety mounted.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and Georgia Public Broadcasting's Stephen Fowler.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the United States to target you? The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby. A small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stand up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 4.30 Eastern on Tuesday, June 21st. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And we've got Stephen Fowler with us from Georgia Public Broadcasting. Hey, Stephen. Hey there. So the clip we just heard from is Ruby Friedman, who's a former election worker in Georgia who was targeted by then President Trump over her work as an election official. Trump's campaign to overturn and delegitimize the 2020 presidential election was the subject of today's hearing on the January 6th committee. Specifically,

the committee looked today at the pressure that Trump and his associates placed on state officials, on local officials, people on the state level who certified the election and then rejected his push over and over again to try and overturn those election results. Stephen, I think Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State, is probably the most famous Secretary of State in America. I think there's no question that Gabriel Sterling is the most famous chief operating officer in a Secretary of State's office in America. I mean, we've heard so much from them in the weeks after the election. You covered every twist and turn of the pressure campaign in Georgia. What mean, we've heard so much from them in the weeks after the election. You covered every

twist and turn of the pressure campaign in Georgia. What did you hear from Raffensperger and Sterling today? There were really compelling characters today because Brad Raffensperger is about as capital C conservative as you can get. So it's not like somebody's questioning the motives of the people speaking about why they stood up for the rule of law and why they did these things. And with Raffensperger, I mean, he testified about the threats that he faced. People sent sexualized text messages to his wife, spoofing like they were coming from him. Somebody broke into his daughter-in-law's house. There were people that were parading outside of a street at all hours of the day and things like that. And it just goes to show the tremendous effort that these election officials undertook to conferences, to pull back the curtain behind this

arcane election rule process procedure to show the state and really the world that the election was trusted, that the results were as they should be, and that the former president's attacks and conspiracies and things just held no water. Remind us, I mean, Stephen, you were one of the people who broke the story of that phone call between Trump and Raffensperger, where Trump infamously asked him to find him votes. Can you remind us what exactly Trump was asking Georgia officials to do? Right. So Trump lost Georgia by about 11,780 votes. And in the weeks after that became apparent, he and his campaign pressured

different parts of the judiciary and Georgia's election system and the investigators and things to say some of those votes shouldn't count and find a way to say Trump won instead of Joe Biden won. And it was the pandemic. There were a lot of absentee ballots. Trump was questioning absentee ballots before the first vote was even cast, Scott. And so this call was kind of a last ditch, last ditch effort to say, hey, you know what? I believe the words Trump used were, you could recalculate the votes. And Raffensperger said, no, that's not something I can do and not something I would do. Yeah. And Deirdre, the Arizona and Pennsylvania pressure campaigns were a little bit different. In those cases, Giuliani and Trump and others were saying, hey, regardless of the popular vote, certified popular vote outcome in your state, send another group of electors to Washington, D.C.

Right. And it was a repeated effort over and over again to try to convince Rusty Bowers that he could do it. And, you know, and he kept saying it's against the law, it's against my oath. It was just sort of like once they couldn't convince him to do one thing, they just tried to go on to plan B. Rusty Bowers is the Republican speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. He said at the very beginning of the of the hearing today he wanted Donald Trump to win the 2020 election, but he didn't win Arizona. Joe Biden won Arizona and Bowers was under an immense amount of pressure from Trump, from Rudy Giuliani and their campaign team to overturn those results and then to reject the electoral college slate backing Biden. I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to with any contrived desire towards deflection of my deep foundational desire

to follow God's will as I believe he led my conscience to embrace. Deirdre, you were in the room today. I want to talk a lot about Bowers, but I'm just curious how the room reacted. I mean, in that particular moment, Bowers was reading from journal entries from the weeks after the 2020 election. He just seemed so earnest and so full of conviction and saying, no, I swore an oath, I'm not going to violate it. I mean, you could really hear a pin drop. I think that Rusty Bowers was one of the most effective witnesses that's come before the January 6th committee so far. Today was the fourth hearing. He was introduced as somebody who identified as a conservative

Republican, somebody who wanted Donald Trump to win the 2020 election, and then someone who came right up against this pressure campaign to overturn the results. He at times sort of paused, and you could tell a couple times he might have been getting a little emotional. I was sitting behind him, so I couldn't see his face. But, you know, all of the members on the dais were listening very intently to his testimony. And some of the things he was saying were about these conversations he was having with people like Rudy Giuliani. He was saying, look, if you guys have evidence, bring the evidence. And he recounted in one meeting where Giuliani said, well, we've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence.

And Bowers said he thought it was a gaffe. He couldn't believe he said it. And he said over and over again, you're asking me to do something that violates my oath. I'm not going to do it. And over this period of time, it's worth saying that Bowers was subject to many ugly threats. And he gave a lot of specifics today.

He did. I mean, there were threats in the forms of emails and text messages to himself, to his family, people coming on the weekends to his neighborhood in front of his house, threatening his neighbors, one individual with a gun. He was, you know, deeply concerned about how it was going and how it kept going on. Right. It was it was a campaign that started in the run-up to January 6th, but it didn't stop. Yeah. And as this committee has detailed,

Trump, Giuliani, other key Trump people were pressuring officials in Arizona, also states like Pennsylvania. The committee at one point played a series of voicemails that Rudy Giuliani was repeatedly leaving for Pennsylvania's House Speaker, who was that Rudy Giuliani was repeatedly leaving for Pennsylvania's House Speaker, who was not taking Giuliani's calls anymore. I understand that you don't want to talk to me now. I just want to bring some facts to your attention and talk to you as a

fellow Republican. Deirdre, what was the point of all of the details that the committee kept spelling out today? Why was it worth hearing Rudy Giuliani call over and over again and say, hey, please pick up the phone? Hey, please reject the slate of electors? I think it was part of the committee's effort to show that this was a very organized effort on the part of Rudy Giuliani, people like John Eastman, also the RNC. It was the first time we saw testimony from Ronna McDaniel, who is the chair of the Republican National Committee, who said that the Trump campaign reached out to get assistance from the RNC. And she acknowledged that they were helpful. She said the campaign was really driving it, but they were looking for people to contact in these swing states where they thought they could try to come up with this alternate set

of electors. So it was people in the Trump campaign, people at the RNC, people close to former President Trump. And the fact that all of these people had this plan and were fanning out and reaching out to people, and some of them getting personal phone calls from the president himself, just shows you this wasn't, you know, a spontaneous thing that happened that sort of disrupted the account on January 6th. This is a weeks-long effort. And people inside the Trump campaign acknowledged they didn't want anything to do with it. And I think what's kind of remarkable about this is, yeah, in Georgia, it's a Republican governor, a Republican legislature, Republicans wrote the election rules. So if there was any place where Republicans could find the justification to say, oh, the results should be different,

Georgia would have been a perfect case for it. But, you know, the governor, who was Secretary of State before being elected governor, and the sitting Secretary of State were kind of two lone pillars, standing up against the party, standing up against the public, standing up against all of these things to defend the Republican-backed election system and the Republican election laws. And I think kind of because it was controlled by Republicans, they felt even more compelled to stand up for what was right. And it is worth pointing out that they both managed, both Kemp and Raffensperger managed to win their recent primaries, despite intense opposition from Trump,

even though they took that stand saying, no, we're not going to break the law for you. All right, we're going to take a quick break. A lot more on this, including getting back to Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shea Moss, after a break. unique story through distinctive design and immersive experiences from medieval falconry to volcanic wine tasting. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of over 30 hotel brands around the world. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. We are back. Stephen, I want to get back to Ruby Freeman, who we heard from at the very beginning of the podcast, as well as her daughter, Shea Moss.

They were both election workers in Georgia who were targeted in intense, nasty, personal and, frankly, racist ways by Rudy Giuliani and other people in the Trump orbit, by the president himself. And Shea Moss had testified about how much she had loved her job as an election official, how much she loved helping voters register, get absentee ballots, have those personal connections. She had to leave it because all of the threats, they made her life terrible and frightening. I don't want anyone knowing my name. I don't want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don't go to the grocery store at all. I haven't been anywhere at all. I've gained about 60 pounds.

I just don't do nothing anymore. I don't want to go anywhere. I second-guess everything that I do. It's affected my life in a major way, in every way. So, Stephen, can you remind us how Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss found themselves entangled in this and what this tells us about the broader pressure campaign? Yeah. So, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss were two election workers at State Farm Arena, which was used as a vote counting

center in Fulton County, where Atlanta is on election night. And there was surveillance video pushed by Rudy Giuliani and others that they said showed Freeman and Moss and others illegally stuffing ballots or scanning ballots multiple times. And it fueled this big conspiracy theory that they altered the election and stole it from Donald Trump. And none of that was true. Almost instantly, election officials and investigators said no, there was nothing illegal or untoward there. It's the normal election processes. They had to fix batches of paper that weren't in order. It only scanned and counted once. You can look at these results and see. But it really is part of this broader trend of people leaving elections after 2020. I attended Georgia's election official conference in 2021, not too long after the dust had settled,

if you could even call the dust settling. And officials there were just broken. They had faced death threats. They had faced poll workers quitting because of COVID and now because of death threats. And every little thing was under scrutiny. And people were worried about ending up on some sort of national list or being attacked by the president of the United States. And frankly, a lot of election officials in Georgia have retired or moved on. Many major metro counties in Georgia are under new leadership this year because people said enough is enough. Yeah. I mean, you could see how the toll that it took on this family. I was sitting in the hearing room right behind Shea Moss and her mother was sitting right behind her. And there were times where, you know, her mom, Ruby Freeman, was wiping tears away from her face, especially when the clip at the end was played about her talking about being targeted by former President Trump.

And at the end of the hearing, members of the panel all walked over and hugged her, and she still had tears streaming down her face. I think we see a lot of officials, you know, governors, other folks testify before Congress all the time. But to hear the personal stories about, you know, election workers who, you know, aren't names that we recognize, I think was, you know, something different in this hearing and something that probably will stick out. Deirdre, anything else worth flagging that was new today that had not been public before today's hearing? Well, Congressman Adam Schiff revealed that there was a phone call placed on January 6 by Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs to Rusty Bowers,

the House Speaker from Arizona. He was trying to get Bowers to go along with his effort to block the certification of the Arizona election results. He wanted him to sign a letter and he wanted to say publicly that he would support this effort. Bowers turned him down. But we know that Biggs is one of the five House Republicans that's been subpoenaed by the committee who's refused to cooperate. And you can see here that they have some evidence from others about what he was doing behind the scenes. So we'll see what else they reveal about other sitting members in the hearings to come. Yeah. I want to go back to one moment with Gabe Sterling, because I think it gets to a lot of the big problems that we're facing right now in our political system. Stephen, you mentioned that over and over again again in November and December and January, Sterling would hold these press conferences and he would say, here is the latest conspiracy theory. Here is why it's false. Here's what you're really seeing.

Stephen, you were talking about that misconstrued video just a few moments ago. But at one point during his testimony today, Sterling said he knows at a certain level that debunking these conspiracy theories is almost like a pointless endeavor. The problem you have is you're getting to people's hearts. I remember there's one specific, an attorney that we know that we showed and walked him through. This wasn't true. Okay, I get that. This wasn't true. Okay, I get that. This wasn't five or six things. But at the end, he goes, I just know in my heart that cheated. I mean, Sterling said it was like a shovel trying to empty out the ocean. And that really is how a lot of us feel covering elections and voting related things in this new almost post-truth era that we're in. And it's what people are worried about in 2024 as well. You know,

Adam Schiff said, you know, things held this time. And there's a real worry that people might not believe reality when it comes to the next presidential election and what did and didn't occur and who won. We have been blessed beyond measure to live in the world's greatest democracy. That is a legacy to be proud of and to cherish, but it is not one to be taken for granted. That we have lived in a democracy for more than 200 years does not mean we shall do so tomorrow. I think Schiff raising that question at the end shows you that members of the committee are concerned about whether this stuff is going to break through or not. You know, he kept repeatedly saying democracy barely held, but will it hold the next time? And I think that, you know, that's the message

that these hearings are trying to send, that this is an ongoing threat. Right. We had a sense of this in real time as it happened, but I don't think we fully understood in the moment just how close this all came to collapsing, just how different things would be if a Bowers goes along with the plan, if a Raffensperger goes along with discounting votes, if a Mike Pence goes along with not accepting the count. I mean, there were so many moments where it almost took a different direction.

And like you said, it might next time. That is a bleak note to end on, but I think it's true to the news of the day. So we'll end things today. We'll be covering the next hearing on Thursday. Stephen Fowler from Georgia Public Broadcasting, thanks for joining us, and thanks for all of your ongoing reporting on this. Always a pleasure. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Always a pleasure.