GA Sec of State Raffensperger Ghosted Lindsey Graham After Strange Request

• Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ghosted Senator Lindsey Graham in November 2020.
• In a newly released transcript, Raffensperger said Graham made an odd request during Georgia’s recount.
• Graham hinted that Georgia’s signature verification should work the same way credit card companies do.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said his office never recalled South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in November 2020 after he said the lawmaker tried to insert himself into the recount of the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Additional transcripts were made public by the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, following the release of the committee’s 845-page final report last week.

In the transcript of the committee’s interview with Raffensperger, he said Graham called his office on November 13, 2020, while a manual vote recount was underway in Georgia, with an odd request. Raffensperger said he was rubbed the wrong way by Graham’s request and gave the senator a cold shoulder.

Raffensperger’s office did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.

“He mentioned the credit card companies,” Raffensperger told the committee in a Nov. 30, 2021 interview. “He says they get millions of signatures every day and they run that through their machines .”

In the transcript, Raffensperger explained that his staffer, Gabe Sterling, handled the conversation on the call where Graham attempted to offer an alternative signature matching process to manual recounting and auditing, which was in progress at the time.

In December 2020, after Raffensperger’s office and Georgia election officials endured weeks of harassment and campaign plotting from Trump’s camp, Sterling received a noose in his home.

On the call with Graham, Raffensperger said there was no outright request to find additional votes as Trump had requested in January 2021, but maintained the conversation was concerning.

“He was talking about a business use process, and I wasn’t sure exactly where he was going,” Raffensperger said. “I just didn’t want to go where he was – where I thought he might want to go. I just thought it best not to call him back.”

Graham’s office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

“And so I told him – we ended the call, and I said, ‘Well, let me speak to our general counsel,’ who wasn’t on the call, ‘and we’ll get back to you. ‘” Raffensperger said in his November interview with the committee, of the conversation with Graham. “And we never got back to him.”

In January 2021, former President Donald Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, a move that Raffensperger said led to months of death threats. against him and his family. In an interview with Insider, Raffensperger argued that election misinformation is the biggest threat to democracy in the United States.