Prominent Liberal Law Scholar Suggests GA Secretary of State Tried To Torpedo GOP Senate Candidate
This time, Donald Trump might not have been the real target.
When a recording of the president’s weekend phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger leaked to the media almost immediately, the obvious result was yet another mainstream media mauling of the man in the White House.
But for George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley, the leak might really have been aimed at torpedoing Republicans in Tuesday’s Senate races in the Peach State – especially now-former Sen. David Perdue.
And considering the results as of Wednesday afternoon, it might have worked.
In a series of Twitter posts Monday, a day before voting began in Georgia, Turley argued that Raffensperger was “evasive” during an interview that day with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, but was very clear about his anger toward Perdue.
“Raffensperger responded on the timing of the release (and Perdue’s criticism) by saying that he blames Perdue for threats against his wife after calling for his resignation. That seemed more petty than principled, leaving the impression that Perdue may have been his real target,” Turley wrote.
Martha MacCallum is doing a great interview Raffensperger, who said that he did not record the call but evaded the key details on taping and timing of the release. I was surprised by the evasive aspects of the interview by someone who has been both credible and unfairly attacked.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 4, 2021
…MacCallum pressed him on why release the tape just a day before the election and Raffensperger deflected the questions. He did indicate that he was a party to the release the tape. He indicated that the release was a type of retaliation or response to Trump…
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 4, 2021
Many of us criticized Pres. Trump for this statement and his past attacks on Raffensperger. However, this response seemed calculated to cause maximum harm. Yet, the blowback will be felt by the Senate candidates. When pressed on that impact, Raffensperger had a curious response.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 4, 2021
…Raffensperger responded on the timing of the release (and Perdue’s criticism) by saying that he blames Perdue for threats against his wife after calling for his resignation.That seemed more petty than principled, leaving the impression that Perdue may have been his real target
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) January 4, 2021
If the goal was hurting Perdue, whose term technically ended on Sunday when the new Congress began, it could be mission accomplished.
As of early Wednesday afternoon Eastern Time, both George Senate races were undeclared, with Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler being challenged by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
However, major news outlets projected Warnock had defeated Loeffler. The Perdue-Ossoff race was too close to call, though Ossoff had a lead, USA Today reported.
Contacted Wednesday by The Western Journal, Raffensperger’s office did not comment on Turley’s tweets. But in fairness, Raffensperger has said he wanted Republicans to retain control of the Senate, which would require at least one of the two GOP incumbents to win.
Still, there’s no denying there’s bad blood among Republicans when it comes to Georgia politics – and a lot of it.
The battleground state is one of a handful where Trump and his supporters say election fraud ended up giving the state and its Electoral College votes to Democrat Joe Biden, and Trump has demanded the state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp resign.
In addition, both Loeffler and Perdue have both demanded that Raffensperger step down over his handling of the presidential contest.
In fact, during that MacCallum interview on Monday, Raffensperger specifically demanded an apology from Perdue, according to Fox News, claiming his wife had received death threats since Perdue called for his resignation.
To Turley, that looked like it could be a solid motive for Raffensperger to want to hurt Perdue.
And one excellent way to do that would be to hurt Trump and the rest of the GOP with a well-timed leak of a phone call any idiot would know would be treated as red meat by the Trump-hating mainstream media.
If that is true, and considering the stakes involved in turning over a Democratic Senate to a prospective Biden administration, with a House of Representatives run by a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in thrall to her party’s radical leftists because she needs every Democratic vote she can get with a tiny majority, Turley’s description of the act as “more petty than principled” pales in reality.
The really ugly part of this whole seamy matter is that, as Turley pointed out in an opinion piece published by Fox News on Wednesday, the whole Trump-Raffensperger call on Saturday was not yet another “worse-than-Watergate” crime by the Trump administration Democrats and the media are so fond of finding.
In fact, while Turley clearly didn’t approve of the call, he wrote that it wasn’t even a crime at all.
Turley is probably best known lately for being one of the few prominent liberal voices in academia who took the president’s side during the Democrats’ sham impeachment process at the end of 2019. (A profile published that December by The New York Times called Turley a “liberal contrarian,” which apparently means someone who generally agrees with the rabidly liberal Times editorial board but who actually thinks for himself.)
His take on the Raffensperger-Trump call was basically that the president was simply repeating the claims he’s made many times, and publicly, since the Nov. 3 election.
“The call Trump participated in was a settlement discussion over election challenges with a variety of lawyers present, not some backroom at the Bada Bing club. The entire stated purpose of the challenges was to count what the Trump campaign alleged were uncounted votes that far surpassed the 11,780 deficit.”
“Trump repeatedly asserted that he won the election and continued to return to the fact that officials only needed to confirm 11,780 of those hundreds of thousands of allegedly uncounted ballots.”
So if there was no real crime involved, what was the actual purpose of the call being leaked?
If the whole country knew that Georgia’s Senate races represented a turning point for the country’s political future, it’s a rock-solid bet that Georgia’s secretary of state knew it too.
But if Turley’s charges are true, that Trump recording became a weapon for Raffensperger against a personal and political rival, as well as a president with whom he was engaging in a very public confrontation.
There was no way of knowing on Wednesday, if ever, how much a role that leaked phone call played in the election results in Georgia, but in any race as important as the Georgia runoff elections, every vote matters.
And whoever delivered that recording to The Washington Post had to know that it could only hurt the Republicans running to keep their Senate seats.
That means the collateral damage of that weapon could well extend to 320 million Americans facing the prospect of a Democratic Washington poised to use its power to do incalculable damage to the country.
For once, Trump might not have been the target, but the rest of the country sure took the hit.
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