In Brief: The Fake Georgia Narrative
Democrats have a long history of sowing confusion and doubt there, says Mollie Hemingway.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway has a bone to pick with The Washington Post over its astounding and belated major correction regarding its reporting on then-President Donald Trump’s phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. Hemingway writes:
The Washington Post was busted for publishing fabricated quotes from an anonymous source, attributing them to a sitting president, and using those quotes as a basis to speculate the president committed a crime. The invented Donald Trump quotes, which related to a fight over election integrity in Georgia, were cited in Democrats’ impeachment brief and during the Senate impeachment trial.
But the fake quotes, bad as they were, are just one of many ways the media have done a horrible job of covering election disputes in the state.
According to the media narrative, the Georgia presidential election was as perfectly run as any election in history, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. To push that narrative, the media steadfastly downplayed, ignored, or prejudiciously dismissed legitimate concerns with how Georgia had run its November 2020 election and complaints about it.
That posture was the complete opposite of how they were reporting on Georgia elections prior to Democrats performing well in them.
Hemingway goes to great length to detail all the leftist efforts, fomented by defeated gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, to sow doubt and distrust in Georgia’s system. Likewise, she recounts how Raffensberger settled a suit with Democrat malcontents, paving the way for the absentee ballot flood in November. After setting up all that background and detailing the shenanigans on election day and the ensuing legal challenges, Hemingway gets back to the infamous phone call.
We now know that the account of Trump’s call to an investigator was based on false quotes. Another call with Raffensberger was also leaked to the press to harm those who opposed Raffensberger’s handling of the election, days before another pivotal election.
Much of the angst over the calls was about Trump saying he needed the secretary of state to “find” votes. This was always characterized as him asking Raffensberger to commit fraud or do something unethical. It even made it into the article of impeachment that Democrats supported.
Anyone familiar with the lawsuit knew Trump was saying his team had already “found” nearly 150,000 irregular or fraudulent votes and simply needed the secretary of state’s office to agree. He was saying they didn’t need to agree that all 150,000 were bad, just that fewer than 10 percent of them were problematic.
The rest was just media spin, which leads Hemingway to conclude, “It wasn’t just the quotes they got wrong about Georgia. It was pretty much everything.”
