transcript
transcript
‘Everybody’s Vote Did Count,’ Top Georgia Election Official Says
Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, delivered a scathing refutation on Monday of President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud.
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The secretary wants me to make clear that everybody’s vote is going to count. Everybody’s vote did count. I want to make that abundantly clear. If you care about, you know, the values and direction of the nation you want to see, it is your obligation to turn out and vote tomorrow — be you a Democrat or Republican. However right now, given the nature of the president’s statements and several other people who have been aligned with him previously, have literally had a rally saying protest and don’t vote, we are specifically asking you and telling you, please turn out and vote tomorrow. The president’s legal team had the entire tape. They watched the entire tape, and from our point of view, intentionally misled the State Senate, voters and the people in the United States about this. It was intentional. It was obvious, and anybody watching this knows that — anyone watching it knows that. That’s why we released the entire tape for people to watch. We’ve seen nothing in our investigations of any of these data claims that shows there are nearly enough ballots to change the outcome. And the secretary and I at this podium have said since Nov. 3, there is illegal voting in every single election in the history of mankind because there are human beings involved in the process. It’s going to happen. It’s a question of limiting it and putting as many safeguards as you can in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.
Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, delivered a scathing refutation on Monday of President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, running through a long list of already-debunked conspiracy theories and systematically debunking each one again.
It was like “Groundhog Day,” he said with evident frustration, adding of the fraud claims, “This is all easily, provably false, yet the president persists, and by doing so undermines Georgians’ faith in the election system.”
Mr. Sterling implored Georgians to vote in Tuesday’s Senate runoff elections and not to be deterred by disinformation.
“If you want your values reflected by your elected officials, I strongly beg and encourage you, go vote tomorrow,” he said. “Do not self suppress your own vote. Don’t let anybody steal your vote that way.”
The office of Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, scheduled the news conference with Mr. Sterling a day after the disclosure of an hourlong phone call in which President Trump repeated a litany of conspiracy theories and asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the will of Georgia voters, who chose President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
[Read more about the voting in Georgia so far.]
Among many other false claims, Mr. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that thousands of votes were cast in Georgia by people who were under 18, weren’t registered to vote, registered late, or registered with a P.O. box instead of a residential address. The secretary of state’s office investigated the claims, Mr. Sterling said, and did not find a single ballot cast by anyone in any of those categories.
“I’ve got such a long list,” he said as he rattled off claims about ballot scanning devices being hacked (“it’s very hard to hack things without modems”) and people replacing parts in Dominion voting machines (“I don’t even know what that means”). He added that Mr. Raffensperger does not have a brother named Ron who works for a Chinese technology company, as one of the conspiracies retweeted by the president claims — nor, in fact, does he have a brother named Ron at all.
“I wanted to scream,” he said of his reaction to the call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Raffensperger. “Well, I did scream at the computer and I screamed in my car at the radio, him talking about this, because this has been thoroughly debunked.”
He demurred when asked if he considered Mr. Trump’s behavior an “attack on democracy,” but said, “I personally found it to be something that was not normal, out of place, and nobody I know who would be president would do something like that to a secretary of state.”
A day before facing voters in a runoff Senate election, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia announced plans to vote against the Electoral College certification process, joining a dozen Republican senators in voting to overturn electors for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The potentially career-defining vote has divided congressional Republicans ahead of a typically perfunctory session on Jan. 6 to confirm Mr. Biden as president and winner of the Electoral College.
Ms. Loeffler, who has aligned herself with President Trump as she fights to maintain her seat in the Senate, made the announcement mere hours before the president was set to take the stage in Georgia to campaign on her behalf. She did not say which state’s electors she would object to. It is the latest instance in which Ms. Loeffler has broken with Georgia Republicans, who have largely resisted Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud after Mr. Biden won the state in November.
“Tens of millions of Americans have real concerns about the way in which the November presidential election was conducted — and I share their concerns,” Ms. Loeffler said in a statement issued Monday evening.
David Perdue, whose term as senator ended on Jan. 3, is also facing a runoff on Tuesday. He said on Sunday that if re-elected, he would also support a challenge to the election result certification even though he would not be present for the vote.
While both Georgia Senate races will take place on Tuesday, only Ms. Loeffler can participate in the joint congressional session on Wednesday to certify the Electoral College results. Mr. Perdue saw his term formally conclude on Sunday with the end of the 116th Congress, while Ms. Loeffler was appointed to finish the term of former Senator Johnny Isakson, which will not end until January 2023.
Sweeping into Atlanta late Monday afternoon, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. made no direct mention of President Trump’s telephone call but did obliquely criticize the president’s strongman tactics.
Addressing a few hundred supporters splayed out on the hoods and roofs of their cars in a downtown parking lot near the former Turner Field, Mr. Biden said Mr. Trump was absorbing a harsh lesson in democracy.
“As our opposition friends are finding out, all power flows from the people,” said the president-elect, adding that politicians cannot “seize power.”
Mr. Biden did, though, take more direct aim at what he described as Mr. Trump’s “god awful” effort to distribute coronavirus vaccines.
“The president spends more time whining and complaining than doing something about the problem,” he said to cheers and horn honks. “I don’t know why he still wants the job, he doesn’t want to do the work.”
Mostly, though, Mr. Biden, clad in a black mask emblazoned with “VOTE,” encouraged the multi-racial audience of Georgians to do just that.
“It’s not hyperbole, you can change America,” he said, claiming that if Democrats control Congress, lawmakers will approve the $2,000 checks Senate Republicans blocked last month, even citing the two Republican runoff candidates — David Perdue, who finished his term on Jan. 3, and Senator Kelly Loeffler — by name to claim they’d oppose the checks.
While some of the attendees at the Biden rally waved signs in support of the two Democratic candidates — the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — many indicated that they got involved in the runoff because they had been galvanized by Mr. Trump.
“We’re supporting democracy because we’ve seen it dwindle these last four years,” said Deshunn Wilkerson, a 36-year-old social worker, who wore a sweatshirt with the pink-and-green letters of the sorority she shares with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
WASHINGTON — The leader of the Proud Boys, the far-right group that has vocally supported President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, was arrested on Monday on charges of destruction of property after he arrived in Washington to protest the congressional certification of the election later this week, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the Proud Boys, was arrested by Metropolitan Police on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a historic Black church in Washington during protests last month that led to several violent clashes, including stabbings, around the city.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department confirmed that Mr. Tarrio, 36, had been arrested on charges of destruction of property, stemming from a mid-December incident in downtown Washington. Upon his arrest he was found to be in possession of two high-capacity firearm magazines and charged accordingly with possession.
The arrest also pits the Justice Department against some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters; the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington acts as the main prosecutor’s office for the District of Columbia.
A police spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Tarrio could not immediately be located, and Mr. Tarrio could not be reached.
Mr. Trump exhorted his supporters to descend on Washington to express their dismay with the certification of the election for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. On New Year’s Day, he promoted what he described as “the BIG Protest Rally” in Washington.
The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2021
The Proud Boys were key players in protests and marches in mid-December that gave way to violent clashes between Mr. Trump’s supporters, counterprotesters and law enforcement, as well as vandalism and destruction of property at churches in the city, including historic Black churches.
The local police said at the time that it would investigate the church attacks as potential hate crimes.
Mr. Tarrio then said on social media and in an interview with The Washington Post that he had burned the Black Lives Matter flag from the Asbury United Methodist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in Washington, and that he would plead guilty to destruction of property if he were faced with a criminal charge.
“Let me make this simple,” he said. “I did it.”
Washington is bracing for another round of protests on Wednesday, when the Senate convenes to certify the results of the Electoral College. Pro-Trump groups including the Proud Boys are expected to protest, and law enforcement officials are preparing for more violence.
Mr. Tarrio had said on far-right message boards and the social media app Parler that the Proud Boys would “turn out in record numbers on Jan 6th,” but that they would fan out across the city “incognito.”
President Trump is sending mixed messages ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections on Tuesday, prioritizing personal grievance over the party’s drive to win the state’s two seats and imperiling Republican control of the Senate.
The president is fixated on his loss in Georgia, an obsession that can be explained by two powerful and concurrent motivations — one psychological, one impelled by calculation and grounded in political reality, people close to him said.
For starters, Mr. Trump simply cannot believe he lost a once-red Southern state — and cannot comprehend that his own unpopularity hastened a political realignment already taking place in the swing state. At the same time, he is very much in touch with the reality that he holds sway over party’s right wing, and sees the runoff as a valuable moment of final political leverage as president.
Over the past week, he has whipsawed from supporting the Senate candidates, albeit tepidly, to griping about the legality of the runoffs, far more passionately.
The president, who will appear with the incumbent Republicans, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in Dalton, Ga. on Monday, wrote on Twitter late Friday that the runoff was “illegal and invalid,” but then urged his supporters a day later to “get ready to vote on Tuesday.”
The trip comes a day after the stunning revelation that Mr. Trump asked Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to find 11,000-plus votes in order to overturn the will of the state’s electorate.
On Monday, Mr. Trump signaled on Twitter that he planned to make his case at the campaign event, intended to kick-start sluggish Republican turnout. It was low in early voting, prompted by skepticism among his own die-hards about the validity of the November results.
Mr. Trump muscled his way to power by bullying the Republican establishment — and the party’s leaders now worry that he might drag them down with him.
In Saturday’s call, which was made public by Mr. Raffensperger’s office, Mr. Trump vaguely threatened to the secretary of state that he would incite wrath — and discourage Republicans from voting — if he did not get his way.
“You’re going to have people just not voting,” said Mr. Trump, hinting at a dark outcome for politicians, like Mr. Rasffensperger, who opposed him. “They don’t want to vote, they hate the state. They hate the governor, and they hate the secretary of state.”
Mr. Raffensperger, in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America, said of the taped one-hour call that Mr. Trump “did most of the talking.”
“We did most of the listening, but I did want to make my points that the data that he has is just plain wrong,” he added.
“It was inappropriate,” Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, told CNN on Monday.
It is a moment of profound angst for Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler. They have tethered themselves to the president in hopes of survival, going so far as to call for the resignation of Mr. Raffensperger, a Trump supporter.
Ms. Loeffler, speaking over the weekend, dodged questions about whether she would support the futile effort to object to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory in the Senate. But Mr. Perdue has said that he would have backed the effort if his Senate term had not expired on Sunday.
In a blow to Mr. Trump, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, declared on Monday that he would oppose that effort, prompting a tweet from the president warning of the consequences.
“Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!” Mr. Trump wrote, singling out Mr. Cotton by name.
Republicans staked out dueling positions on Monday about whether to join the sizable faction of their party that is seeking to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election on Wednesday when Congress meets to certify it. The vote, which is potentially career-defining, has sowed deep divisions in their ranks.
A group of conservative House Republicans argued that the move violated the Constitution, noting that state electors reflecting the will of voters — not Congress — decide elections.
“To take action otherwise — that is, to unconstitutionally insert Congress into the center of the presidential election process — would amount to stealing power from the people and the states,” wrote the group, which included Representatives Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, Ken Buck of Colorado, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Tom McClintock of California, Chip Roy of Texas and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
“It would, in effect, replace the Electoral College with Congress, and in so doing strengthen the efforts of those on the left who are determined to eliminate it or render it irrelevant,” they added.
Though the Republican effort to reject the election results is expected to fail, a dozen Republican senators and many more in the House plan to vote against electors for Mr. Biden on Wednesday when Congress is set to hold what’s normally a perfunctory session to confirm Mr. Biden’s victory.
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who last year led a successful recruitment effort to bring more conservative women into Congress, said she would join the push. She cited the widely held belief among the party’s base that the election was stolen through fraud, a debunked claim that Mr. Trump has stoked for weeks, and which has been amplified by the right-wing news media and many Republican lawmakers.
“I have an obligation to act on this matter if I believe there are serious questions with respect to the presidential election. I believe those questions exist,” Ms. Stefanik said in a video message posted on Twitter. “Tens of millions of Americans are rightly concerned that the 2020 election featured unprecedented voting irregularities, unconstitutional overreach by unelected state officials and judges ignoring state election laws, and a fundamental lack of ballot integrity and security.”
Every state in the country has certified the election results after verifying their accuracy, and judges across the country have rejected nearly 60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the results. Former Attorney General William P. Barr said the Justice Department had not uncovered any voting fraud that would have changed the results of the election.
Representative Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican, called the move “exceptionally dangerous.”
“None of these investigations or lawsuits has resulted in evidence of fraud that comes anywhere close to the standard for rejecting a state’s electoral votes,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said in a statement announcing her opposition to the effort. “Refusing to count a state’s electoral votes in the absence of such evidence would disenfranchise millions of American voters and call into question the very foundation of representative government enshrined in our Constitution.”
Chief executives and other leaders from many of America’s largest businesses on Monday urged Congress to certify the electoral vote on Wednesday to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential victory.
“Attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy,” they said in a statement. Included in the list of 170 signers were Laurence D. Fink of BlackRock, Logan Green and John Zimmer of Lyft, Brad Smith of Microsoft, Albert Bourla of Pfizer, and James Zelter of Apollo Global Management.
Over the weekend, President Trump called Georgia’s Republican secretary of state in an effort to subvert the election results. On the call, which was recorded, the president pressured the official to “find” enough votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory. The president’s demand raised questions about whether he violated election fraud statutes, lawyers said, though a charge is unlikely. President-elect Biden won the Electoral College, 306 to 232, and the popular vote was 81.2 million for Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump’s 74.2 million.
Members of the president’s party are divided over whether to accept that he lost the election: While top Republicans, such as Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, have pushed back on a futile attempt in Congress to reject the results, about a dozen senators and senators-elect have lined up behind President Trump’s bid to hold on to power.
The urging from business leaders came on a volatile day for financial markets and just a day before runoff elections in Georgia, which will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate. Coronavirus cases are surging, and vaccinations are taking more time than hoped.
Business leaders took issue with Washington’s new divide at a moment of grave uncertainty.
“Our duly elected leaders deserve the respect and bipartisan support of all Americans at a moment when we are dealing with the worst health and economic crises in modern history,” the business leaders wrote. “There should be no further delay in the orderly transfer of power.”
The statement, which was organized by Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy organization, came on the same day that Thomas J. Donohue, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement urging certification of the vote.
“Efforts by some members of Congress to disregard certified election results in an effort to change the election outcome or to try a make a long-term political point undermines our democracy and the rule of law and will only result in further division across our nation,” Mr. Donohue wrote.
“The United States of America faces enormous challenges that not only require an orderly transition of administrations, but the focus of the incoming Biden administration and the new Congress, and cooperation across party lines,” he continued. “We urge Congress to fulfill its responsibility in counting the electoral votes, the Trump administration to facilitate an orderly transition for the incoming Biden administration, and all of our elected officials to devote their energies to combating the pandemic and supporting our economic recovery.”
The top federal prosecutor in Atlanta abruptly announced his departure on Monday, two days after President Trump complained that the prosecutor did not support him as he pushed Georgia’s secretary of state to give into unfounded claims that the city had seen massive voter fraud and complained.
Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, said in an email to his office on Monday that he was resigning immediately, according to a spokesman. He gave no reason other than unforeseen events, and spokesmen for his office in Atlanta and the Justice Department in Washington declined to comment further.
Multiple people who have spoken with Mr. Pak expected his departure and said that he had been looking for other work. Several other U.S. attorneys have left since the election, including in Texas, Missouri, Ohio and North Carolina, and more are expected to go before the end of the Trump administration on Jan. 20.
But Mr. Pak’s decision to leave on the same day as he announced his departure took people in the department by surprise.
Known as BJay, Mr. Pak was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 to serve as the U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgia, a district that includes Atlanta and Fulton County.
While Mr. Trump did not criticize Mr. Pak by name, and there are three U.S. attorneys in the Georgia, he has lately become increasingly focused on the specious claim that poll workers in Fulton County manipulated the vote count.
“If you check the signatures, a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County, you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures,” Mr. Trump said in a phone call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refuted the allegation.
Mr. Trump also complained about the quality of the investigative work into voter fraud in Georgia, especially in Fulton County. “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there,” he said.
Mr. Pak also served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017.
A group of prominent American historians added their voice on Monday to the debate about President Trump’s effort to overturn the election, decrying what they called an undemocratic bid to unravel a free and fair vote that has no historical precedent in the long annals of the United States.
“Never before in our history has a president who lost re-election tried to stay in office by subverting the democratic process set down by the Constitution,” the historians said in a statement. “That is what President Trump has been doing since November 3, when a strong electoral majority of Americans chose Joseph R. Biden to be the 46th president of the United States.”
The historians’ statement pointed out that the 2020 election was not even particularly close in historical terms. Mr. Biden won more Electoral College votes than the winning candidates in five elections since 1960 and larger popular majorities than in more than half of the presidential elections held in the last six decades.
“Yet in none of these elections did any losing candidate attempt to claim victory by brazenly sabotaging the electoral process as Donald Trump has done and continues to do,” said the letter, organized by Douglas Brinkley of Rice University and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University.
Among the 22 signatories were Ron Chernow, Jon Meacham, Kenneth Mack, Susan Dunn, Akhil Reed Amar, David Blight and H.W. Brands. Also signing was Michael W. McConnell of Stanford University, a former appeals court judge who was effectively repudiating the effort led by one of his old clerks, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri.
In the 220 years since a defeated President John Adams turned over the White House to his rival, firmly establishing the peaceful transfer of power as a bedrock principle, no sitting president who lost an election has tried to hang onto power by rejecting the Electoral College and subverting the will of the voters — until now.
It is a scenario at once utterly unthinkable and yet feared since the beginning of President Trump’s tenure.
The president has gone well beyond simply venting his grievances or creating a face-saving narrative to explain away a loss, as advisers privately suggested he was doing in the days after the Nov. 3 vote, but instead has pressed the boundaries of tradition, propriety and the law to find any way he can to cling to office beyond his term that expires in two weeks.
He has called the Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona to get them to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. He has summoned Michigan’s Republican legislature leaders to the White House to pressure them to change their state’s results. He called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House twice to do the same.
Mr. Trump’s hourlong telephone call over the weekend with Georgia’s chief election official, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find” enough votes to overturn Mr. Biden’s win in the state, only brought into stark relief what Mr. Trump has been doing for weeks. He and his staff have floated the idea of delaying Mr. Biden’s inauguration, which is set in stone by the Constitution, and he met with a former adviser urging him to declare martial law.
But Mr. Trump’s baseless and desperate claims of a stolen election have failed to gain traction in the courts, despite some 60 lawsuits filed by the president and his allies.
On Monday, a federal judge in Washington denied one of the stranger lawsuits to have challenged the election so far — an effort by a conservative group, the Amistad Project, that sought to clear the way for Vice President Mike Pence not to accept electors from several key swing states.
“It would be risible were its target not so grave: the undermining of a democratic election for president of the United States,” Judge James Boasberg wrote. “Courts are not instruments through which parties engage in such gamesmanship or symbolic political gestures.”
The president has denied attempting to subvert democracy, but his efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary.
“Today’s leaders come in through elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office — until they get enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there indefinitely, as Putin and Orban have done,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”
Vice President Mike Pence kicked off the start of a final push by party leaders on Monday to urge voters to turn out for Tuesday’s highly consequential runoff elections.
He implored Georgians to send Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler back to Washington, allowing Republicans to maintain control of the Senate.
“In one more day, we need Georgia to defend the majority,” Mr. Pence said in a midday appearance at a church in Milner, Ga. “A Republican Senate majority could be our last line of defense.”
An influx of new voters and a fractured Republican electorate have given Democrats hope for a power-shifting victory by their Senate candidates, Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who won the state in November, will campaign with the two men on Monday in the largely Democratic Atlanta area.
The Republican incumbents are turning to President Trump to shore up the vote and motivate the Georgians who supported him in November, even as the president continues to challenge the validity of the state’s results. Mr. Trump is holding a rally on Monday evening with the two candidates in Dalton, a city in northwest Georgia in a region where early voting turnout has been relatively light.
Some Republicans worry that the president’s two-month campaign against the election outcome could keep Trump supporters home on Tuesday because of a loss of faith in the system. There are also concerns about the potential for Mr. Trump to use Monday’s appearance to mostly talk about himself, particularly after the release of a recording of a call between Mr. Trump and the state’s top elections official.
During the call, the president warned of a “criminal offense” if the state could not find the votes that would hand him the state’s 16 Electoral College votes.
Mr. Perdue was confident on Sunday that Mr. Trump would focus on the senators in his appearance “because he knows what’s at stake.” During an interview on Fox News, Mr. Perdue said if the two Democrats won, Georgians would see a “radical socialist and very dangerous agenda” out of Washington.
If the Republican candidates win, Mr. Biden will face gridlock in the Senate and struggle to pass legislation.
Former president Barack Obama cast Tuesday’s runoff elections in Georgia as an existential struggle for core democratic institutions, hours after a recording was made public of President Trump pressuring an official of the state to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss there.
“Tomorrow is Election Day in Georgia and the stakes could not be higher,” the former president wrote on Twitter on Monday afternoon. “We’re seeing how far some will go to retain power and threaten the fundamental principles of our democracy. But our democracy isn’t about any individual, even a president — it’s about you.”
While his language was somewhat veiled, a person close to Mr. Obama said the statement was in response to the recording, in which Mr. Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to overturn the results of November’s election.
Late Sunday, when news of the call broke, Mr. Obama’s close friend, former Attorney General Eric Holder, posted a screen capture of the federal statute stipulating that it is a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, for any “person” to “knowingly and willfully” intimidate, threaten or coerce officials to overturn the results of “a fair and impartially conducted election process.”
Over the last several weeks, Mr. Obama has confined his political tweets to general get-out-the-vote messages on behalf of the Democratic Senate candidates, the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, and his usual end-of-year social media fare — including lists of his favorite books and songs.
For the first three years of Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Obama steered clear of engaging with his successor directly, emerging only to counter falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims, including Mr. Trump’s charge that the former president personally authorized the wiretapping of Trump Tower in 2016.
That all changed during the homestretch of the 2020 general election campaign, when Mr. Obama delivered an impassioned denunciation of Mr. Trump during the virtual Democratic National Convention.
Later, Mr. Obama embarked on a brief end-of-campaign barnstorming tour on behalf of Democrats in which he ridiculed Mr. Trump — going so far as to suggest his demand for affirmation stemmed from lackluster attendance at his childhood birthday parties.
“Did no one come to his birthday party as a kid?” Mr. Obama asked during an appearance in Michigan in late October.
Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who is running for Senate in Georgia’s Tuesday runoffs, criticized President Trump at a campaign event on Monday for having pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” votes to undermine the outcome of the election.
Mr. Ossoff, who is challenging the incumbent, David Perdue, drew parallels between Mr. Trump’s effort and the bitter history of disenfranchisement in the state, citing poll closures and cumbersome voting rules.
“The president of the United States on the phone trying to intimidate Georgia’s election officials to throw out your votes,” Mr. Ossoff told supporters at a canvassing event in Conyers, a suburb east of Atlanta. “Let’s send a message: Don’t come down to Georgia and try to mess with our voting rights.”
Among Democrats, the president’s statement only added to their anger and drive to defeat the two Republican candidates, Mr. Perdue, whose term ended on Jan. 3, and Senator Kelly Loeffler. Both have closely aligned themselves with Mr. Trump.
Hillary Drummond Simpson, a retired elementary and middle school teacher, said that she has been left puzzled by the support that the president still has. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t understand what they are looking for in a leader.”
“I’m shocked to see a president leaving office has so much power still,” she said.
Verdailia Turner, who was in Conyers to help with canvassing, said she could sense the momentum surrounding the race. “It’s like a perfect, beautiful storm, and all eyes are on us,” said Ms. Turner, the president of the Georgia Federation of Teachers. “It’s imperative we bring some sanity back to Washington, D.C.”
Georgia elections officials have received at least two requests for investigations into whether President Trump violated state laws prohibiting election interference in his phone call Saturday with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. But as of early Monday afternoon, it appeared no such investigation had been opened.
On Sunday, The Washington Post, followed by other news outlets, reported that Mr. Trump, in a recorded phone call, had asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia, and appeared to vaguely threaten Mr. Raffensperger with “a criminal offense.” A number of lawyers have since said that Mr. Trump may have violated state and federal laws, but said that such charges may prove difficult to pursue.
On Sunday evening, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s five-member state elections board wrote a letter to Mr. Raffensperger requesting that his office open an investigation to determine whether Mr. Trump had violated state law.
Then, on Monday, the state board of elections received a complaint from John F. Banzhaf III, a law professor at George Washington University. Mr. Banzhaf also requested an investigation, citing three specific state statutes dealing with the commission of election fraud and interference with state officials’ performance of election duties.
Mr. Raffensperger, as secretary of state, serves as chair of the five-person state elections board, and in many cases, investigators in his office would start an investigation based on such complaints.
In an interview Monday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the host George Stephanopoulos asked Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, if he would open an investigation into Mr. Trump’s phone call.
Mr. Raffensperger said that because he had been on the call, he might have a conflict of interest, and suggested instead that such an investigation might be in the works by the Fulton County district attorney.
“I understand that the Fulton County district attorney wants to look at it. Maybe that’s the appropriate venue,” Mr. Raffensperger said.
Mr. Raffensperger’s office did not return queries Monday from The Times asking for clarification as to whether he would indeed formally step back from the matter. Mr. Raffensperger’s office is planning a news conference at 3 p.m. at the state Capitol in Atlanta.
Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, has not yet opened an investigation, said Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis and the incoming deputy district attorney. Mr. DiSantis said that his office had not yet received a formal notification from Mr. Raffensperger that he wished to hand off the decision. Mr. DiSantis noted that the office of the state attorney general, Christopher M. Carr, might also have jurisdiction over such a matter.
Mr. Carr’s office did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
In a prepared statement, Ms. Willis said that she found Mr. Trump’s conversation with the secretary of state “disturbing.”
“Once the investigation is complete, this matter, like all matters, will be handled by our office based on the facts and the law,” she said.
President Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to one of his most outspoken Republican defenders in the House, Representative Devin Nunes of California, and plans to award another to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in the coming days, two officials familiar with his plans said.
The award is the nation’s highest civilian honor, meant to recognize “exceptional contributions” to national security, world peace or cultural and other “significant” endeavors. While presidents have bestowed the honor on members of Congress in the past, it has typically been granted at the end of a lawmaker’s time in public service or in recognition for an unrelated achievement.
In the case of Mr. Nunes and Mr. Jordan, however, Mr. Trump wants to honor the lawmakers for their leading roles in personally defending him against the F.B.I.’s investigation of Russian election interference and the House’s impeachment inquiry, according to the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss plans not yet made public.
Both investigations uncovered wrongdoing by the president and his advisers, but Mr. Trump viewed them as partisan “witch hunts,” demanding his party rally around him to fend them off. Mr. Nunes and Mr. Jordan enthusiastically answered the call, working in public and in private to dig up unflattering information about those investigating the president, including his own Justice Department, which they would then publicize, often with the help of the White House.
The two took a similar approach when Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump based on his attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Jordan, a pugnacious force in congressional hearings, became the face of Mr. Trump’s defense on Capitol Hill, ultimately helping to win his acquittal in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The work infuriated Democrats, but it made Mr. Nunes and Mr. Jordan heroes on the right and persuaded many in their party to follow suit. In 2018, Mr. Trump said that Mr. Nunes, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, ought to be awarded the Medal of Freedom or the Medal of Honor, which is reserved for military valor, based on his attempts to discredit the Russia investigation.
That Mr. Trump is doing so now, even as he refuses to concede his election defeat, suggests that he recognizes his time in office is limited.
Mr. Nunes received the honor in a ceremony on Monday, and Mr. Trump is likely to bestow it upon Mr. Jordan next week. The Washington Post first reported the awards.
The call by President Trump on Saturday to Georgia’s secretary of state raised the prospect that Mr. Trump may have violated laws that prohibit interference in federal or state elections, but lawyers said on Sunday that it would be difficult to pursue such a charge.
The recording of the conversation between Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, first reported by The Washington Post, led a number of election and criminal defense lawyers to conclude that by pressuring Mr. Raffensperger to “find” the votes he would need to reverse the election outcome in the state, Mr. Trump either broke the law or came close to it.
“It seems to me like what he did clearly violates Georgia statutes,” said Leigh Ann Webster, an Atlanta criminal defense lawyer, citing a state law that makes it illegal for anyone who “solicits, requests, commands, importunes or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage” in election fraud.
At the federal level, anyone who “knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” is breaking the law.
Matthew T. Sanderson, a Republican election lawyer who has worked on several presidential campaigns — including those of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor — said that while it did appear that Mr. Trump was trying to intimidate Mr. Raffensperger, it was not clear that he violated the law.
That is because while Mr. Trump clearly implied that Mr. Raffensperger might suffer legal consequences if he did not find additional votes for the president in Georgia, Mr. Trump stopped short of saying he would deliver on the threat himself against Mr. Raffensperger and his legal counsel, Ryan Germany, Mr. Sanderson said.
ATLANTA — As hundreds of millions of dollars have been pumped into Georgia for a runoff election that will determine which party controls the Senate, few groups have been as vigorously pursued as young voters.
Voter registration efforts and political campaigns have tried to reach them through TikTok videos, poetry readings and drive-in events with celebrities. College Republicans have had phone-banking competitions, while other volunteer groups have approached young voters on dating apps, such as Tinder.
The work has paid off. More than 75,000 new voters registered ahead of the runoffs, more than half of them under the age of 35. Campaigns put an intense focus on 23,000 young people who were not old enough to vote in November but are qualified to do so in the runoffs.
Early voting began in mid-December, and so far, more than three million people have cast their ballots — about 75 percent of the early votes cast in November’s general election, which set turnout records. Over 360,000 early voters in the runoffs were between the ages of 18 and 29, according to data maintained by GeorgiaVotes.com.
The intense interest surrounding the Senate races has reached across party lines.
“I think that young voters have felt so disconnected from politics, and their voice was not heard,” said Bryson Henriott, a sophomore at the University of Georgia and the political director for the College Republicans chapter. “They’re the ones door-knocking for these campaigns, they are the ones on social media. Now that young people feel like they have a voice in politics, they’re going to stay focused.”
BRUSSELS — President Trump’s extraordinary, wheedling telephone call to state officials in Georgia seeking to overturn the election results there has shaken many Europeans — not so much for what it reveals about Mr. Trump himself, but for what it may portend for the health of American democracy.
Foreign leaders are looking forward, but many worry that the Trump effect will last for years, damaging trust in American predictability and reliability.
“A lot of people will just roll their eyes and wait for the clock to run down,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, the British research institution. “But by far the most troubling thing is the number of Republicans who are willing to go along with him, and what it’s doing to the Republican Party, playing out in real time.”
A group of House Republicans has vowed to challenge Biden’s Electoral College win on Wednesday when Congress meets to certify it, and at least a dozen Republican senators are expected to join them, forcing a vote though it is all but certain to fail.
The dangers that entails for foreign allies are manifold and will not be easily dispelled even with a new president. But they are raising special concerns before Mr. Trump exits.
Patrick Chevallereau, a former French military officer now at RUSI, a defense research institution in London, said that the Trump call “shows that the current president is in a mind-set to do anything — absolutely anything — before Jan. 20. There is zero standard, zero reference, zero ethics.”
And Laurence Nardon, head of the North America program at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, said that America’s soft power and democratic example is damaged by Mr. Trump’s behavior.
But he added, “I think we have understood that his practice of power is an exception, even if his election is not an accident.”
All 10 living former defense secretaries warned in an op-ed on Sunday against involving the military in election disputes and urged leaders at the Defense Department to facilitate a smooth transition with the incoming administration.
The op-ed, published by The Washington Post, was an extraordinary public statement from a group of officials who served presidents from both parties. Its signatories included President Trump’s two Senate-confirmed defense secretaries, James N. Mattis and Mark T. Esper, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney.
The former defense secretaries weighed in with one voice as Mr. Trump continues to make baseless claims about the election and refuses to recognize his defeat.
“Our elections have occurred,” they wrote. “Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the Electoral College has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the Electoral College votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.”
In the op-ed, the former secretaries — who served under Mr. Trump and Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Gerald R. Ford — said unequivocally that the military had no role to play in settling election-related controversies.
“Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory,” they wrote. “Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom Mr. Trump recently pardoned, suggested on the conservative television network Newsmax last month that Mr. Trump could use the military to “rerun” the election in swing states, and later attended a meeting with the president at the White House.
The former defense secretaries also called for cooperation at the Pentagon during the transition between administrations, an issue that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his team have complained about. Last week, Mr. Biden said his transition team had faced “obstruction” from the Defense Department.
In the op-ed, the former defense secretaries noted that transitions “can be a moment when the nation is vulnerable to actions by adversaries seeking to take advantage of the situation,” and they said it was critical that the transition at the Pentagon “be carried out fully, cooperatively and transparently.”
WASHINGTON — Democrats returned Representative Nancy Pelosi of California to the House speakership on Sunday for what may be her final term, handing a tested leader control of the slimmest majority in almost two decades as Washington prepares for a new Democratic president.
The nearly party-line vote punctuated an opening day marked more by precaution than pomp, as the 117th Congress convened under the threat of a deadly pandemic and awaited a pair of Senate runoffs in Georgia that will determine control of that chamber. Several House members sick with Covid-19 missed the session altogether and others cast their votes from behind a plexiglass enclosure specially constructed in a gallery overlooking the chamber.
Her victory means that after two years as President Trump’s most outspoken antagonist, Ms. Pelosi will now be responsible for trying to shepherd through Congress as much of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s agenda as possible.
“Scripture tells us that to everything, there is a season: a time for every purpose under the heavens; a time to build, a time to sow, a time to heal,” she said in a speech after winning the speakership. “Now is certainly a time for our nation to heal. Our most urgent priority will continue to be defeating the coronavirus. And defeat it, we will.”
It will be no easy task. With her party in control of just 222 of 435 seats, Ms. Pelosi can afford to lose only a handful of Democrats on any given vote. Emboldened Republicans are gunning to retake the majority in next year’s midterm elections and are in no mood to extend an olive branch.
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, used his own remarks before presenting Ms. Pelosi the gavel to torch Democrats’ record in the majority and effectively declare the beginning of the campaign to wrest power from them.
“It has been said that a house divided cannot stand,” he said. “Well, if there is any lesson Americans have learned in the last two years, it’s this: A House distracted cannot govern.”
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s incoming national security adviser said on Sunday that the new administration would move quickly to renew the last remaining major nuclear arms treaty with Russia, even while seeking to make President Vladimir V. Putin pay for what appeared to be the largest-ever hacking of U.S. government networks.
In an interview on “GPS” on CNN, Jake Sullivan, who at 44 will become the youngest national security adviser in more than a half century, also said that as soon as Iran re-entered compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal — which he helped negotiate under President Barack Obama — there would be a “follow-on negotiation” over its missile capabilities.
“In that broader negotiation, we can ultimately secure limits on Iran’s ballistic missile technology,” Mr. Sullivan said, “and that is what we intend to try to pursue through diplomacy.”
He did not mention that missiles were not covered in the previous accord because the Iranians refused to commit to any limitations on their development or testing. To bridge the impasse, the United Nations passed a weakly worded resolution that called on Tehran to show restraint; the Iranians say it is not binding, and they have ignored it.
Taken together, Mr. Sullivan’s two statements indicated how quickly the new administration would be immersed in two complex arms control issues, even as Mr. Biden seeks to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and the economic shocks it has caused.
Two high-stakes Senate runoffs in Georgia are concluding with a test of how much the politics have shifted in a state that no longer resembles its Deep South neighbors.
Should the two challengers win Tuesday and hand Democrats control of the Senate, it will be with the same multiracial and heavily metropolitan support that propelled President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to victory in Georgia and nationally. And if the Republican incumbents prevail, it will be because they pile up margins in conservative regions, just as President Trump did.
That is a marked change from the 2000 election, when George W. Bush won decisively in the Atlanta suburbs to take the state and Democrats still ran competitively with right-of-center voters in much of rural North and South Georgia.
After resisting the tide of Republicanism longer than in other parts of the South — it did not elect its first governor from the party until 2002 — Georgia became a reliably red state in the nearly two decades since. But now, it is fast turning into a political microcosm of the country.
Although Georgia still skews slightly to the right of America’s political center, it has become politically competitive for the same demographic reasons the country is closely divided: Democrats have become dominant in big cities and suburban areas but they suffer steep losses in the lightly populated regions that once elected governors, senators and, in Georgia, a native-born president, Jimmy Carter.
“Georgia is now a reflection of the country,” said Keith Mason, a former chief of staff to Zell Miller, a Democratic governor and U.S. senator from a small town in North Georgia.