Georgia governor rebuffs Trump’s call for special session to overturn election results, top official says
“We’re certainly not going to move the goal posts at this point in the election,” Duncan said.
The lieutenant governor also weighed in on Trump’s Saturday night rally in the state. He said he was encouraged by the parts of the speech in which the president urged his supporters to vote for Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) in Senate runoff elections next month that could decide which party controls the upper chamber.
But Duncan said Trump’s fanning of the flames around misinformation was “concerning,” pointing to the president’s repeated false claims that he won the election and that the election was “stolen.”
“The mountains of misinformation are not helping the process; they’re only hurting it,” Duncan said.
The lieutenant governor’s remarks came one day after Trump called Kemp to urge him to persuade the Georgia legislature to overturn Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures.
At his rally Saturday night in Valdosta, Ga., Trump briefly lashed out at Kemp for not embracing the allegations of fraud. “Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump said. He added: “So far we haven’t been able to find the people in Georgia willing to do the right thing.”
The White House continued to put pressure on Kemp on Sunday. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, speaking as a Trump campaign adviser, said in a Fox News Channel interview Sunday morning that “there is plenty” Kemp can do to aid Trump in overturning the results.
McEnany also perhaps inadvertently acknowledged Biden’s win, noting that Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris would be the deciding vote in the Senate if Democrats win both seats in Georgia.
“You have the power to call in a special legislative session because right now, if we lose these two Senate seats, guess who’s casting the deciding vote in this country for our government? It will be Kamala Harris,” McEnany said, addressing Kemp directly. “Call for the special legislative session. Governor Kemp can also threaten the budget of the secretary of state.”
Other Trump administration officials were careful Sunday to give no indication that they view Biden and Harris as the election victors.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar referred to Biden as “Vice President Biden” during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” When host Chris Wallace corrected him, noting that Biden is president-elect, Azar ignored him.
Last week, Gabriel Sterling, a top official in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office, called on Trump to stop spreading false claims about fraud, saying in an impassioned speech that the rhetoric was leading to threats of violence against election workers.
On Sunday, Sterling said he decided to speak out after receiving a phone call from a project manager at Dominion Voting Systems, the company that has been at the center of the false fraud claims by Trump and his allies.
Sterling said the manager told him “in a very audibly shaken voice” that one of his contractors, “a young tech” in Georgia, had been receiving death threats.
“He took a job a few weeks ago; he’s one of their better ones,” Sterling said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “I was going through the Twitter feed on it and I saw it basically had the young man’s name — it was a very unique name, so they tracked down his family and started harassing them. And it said, ‘His name, you have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul,’ with a slowly swinging noose. And at that point, I just said, ‘I’m done.’ ”
Duncan echoed that message Sunday, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that he, too, has been targeted by threats and that he and other officials have received increased security. Duncan said he was disgusted by the threats.
Duncan also noted that he, Kemp and Raffensperger (R) all voted for and campaigned for the president. Trump didn’t win the state, Duncan said, adding, “That doesn’t change our job description.”
In an interview Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” Raffensperger said that he has received death threats and that his wife has received “sexualized texts and things like that.”
“And now they’ve actually gone after people, been following … young poll workers and election workers in Gwinnett County and also our folks at one of our offices,” Raffensperger said. “And so, you’re seeing just irrational, angry behavior. It’s unpatriotic. People shouldn’t be doing that.”
Like Duncan, Raffensperger said that as a conservative Republican, he was disappointed with the election results but that there is no evidence of any fraud that “would overturn the will of the people here in Georgia.”
Asked about the possibility of a special session, Raffensperger said that the decision is not his to make but that such a move appeared unlikely.
“I don’t believe that there’s the will in the General Assembly for a special session. … That’s with the governor and the general assembly, and I’m sure they’ll have conversations,” he said. “But at the end of the day, what they’re really trying to say is if they did that, they would be then nullifying the will of the people.”
Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that Trump’s repeated, baseless claims of fraud are “corrosive to confidence in the election and democracy.”
“It is time for leaders in the national security community and in the Republican Party to stand up to accept the results and move forward,” said Krebs, who was fired by Trump last month after he disputed allegations that election systems had been manipulated. “We cannot allow this to continue, certainly not past January 20th, certainly not for the next four years. Any sort of ‘lost cause’ movement would be just horribly destructive to democracy.”
Amy Gardner and Jeanne Whalen contributed to this report.
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