#bully biden into recounts and audits

[the-demure-abstract]

(CNN)Astonishing new evidence of a desperate President Donald Trump caught on tape trying to steal the election exposes the depth of his corruption and makes his Republican Capitol Hill allies complicit in his bid to thwart the will of voters.

In a fresh abuse of power, Trump tried to bully a top Georgia GOP official into finding votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win in the state. The staggering telephone call, audio of which was obtained by CNN and first reported by the Washington Post, amounted to the most serious threat yet posed by his authoritarian instincts to American democracy.

'I just want to find ... votes'

The release of the stunning telephone conversation between Trump and Georgia's GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger escalated the constitutional crisis Trump started stoking even before his election loss.

"So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said, in a comment that at best was an abuse of power and that could raise legal questions. Throughout the hour-long call, the President repeatedly prods Raffensperger to agree to his false claims that thousands of votes were illegally cast, that some ballots were destroyed or came from dead people or out-of-state voters. The Georgia secretary of state tells the President that he has false information.

CNN has obtained the full January 2 audio call between President Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump is joined on the call by White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and several lawyers. CNN obtained the audio from a source who was on the call and had direct knowledge of the conversation. CNN has redacted the name of one individual about whom Trump made unsubstantiated claims.

A string of recounts, audits and legal cases have affirmed Biden's narrow victory in Georgia in November in one of the clutch of swing states he won on the way to 306 electoral votes and a clear victory over the President.

The tape recalled the kind of coercive, corrupt behavior that led to Trump's impeachment over a call with Ukraine's President, but that all Republican senators with the exception of Mitt Romney decided last year did not merit his ouster from office.

In the latest smoking gun call, Trump is heard trying to convince Raffensperger to announce that he had recalculated the vote totals and that the President won, and threatening criminal reprisals if his fellow Republican failed to act.

"At the very least it's an abuse of presidential power which in a normal time would be impeachable," said CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali.