Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, is sworn in to testify on Tuesday, June 21, 2022 before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger testified he and his family were targets of harassment and threats.
- Raffensperger said there was no fraud in Georgia in the 2020 presidential election.
- Trump told Raffensperger his comments were “very dangerous” for him.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Tuesday detailed the harassment he and his family faced after he refused to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results and defended the state’s election integrity.
“My wife started getting the texts and hers typically came in as sexualized texts, which were disgusting,” Raffensperger said during his testimony before the January 6 committee. “You have to understand that Trish and I met in high school and we have been married over 40 years now. They started going after her I think to probably put pressure on me: ‘Why don’t you just quit and walk away?'”
After the election, Raffensperger’s phone and email were doxxed, meaning that someone had posted the number and email publicly so that people would message him. The secretary of state testified that he received texts from all over the US and eventually his wife became a target of harassment too.
The harassment went beyond the digital realm. Trump supporters broke into the home of Raffensperger’s daughter-in-law, who is a widow with two children, Raffensperger testified.
“We are very concerned about her safety as well,” Raffensberger said.
Raffensperger was at the center of a January 2021 phone call in which Trump pleaded with him to “find” additional votes that would help him overcome Biden’s roughly 12,000-vote victory in Georgia. During the contentious conversation, Trump made false accusations about voter fraud in the election and suggested he could be criminally liable for failing to change enough votes to throw the state for Trump, but Raffensperger declined to go along with the then-president’s wishes.
On Tuesday, Raffensperger opened up about the harassment that came as a result, in response to a question from Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California.
Schiff first played a recorded conversation between Trump and Raffensperger, in which the Georgia official publicly denied that any election fraud had occurred.
“When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that,” Trump told Raffensperger in the recording.
Raffensperger wrote about the exchange in his book “Integrity Counts” that he took the comments as a threat.
“I felt then and still believe today that this was a threat,” Raffensperger wrote. “Others obviously thought so too, because some of Trump’s more radical followers have responded as if it was their duty to carry out this threat.”
During his testimony Tuesday, Raffensperger said he refused to back down.
“I knew that we had followed the law and we had followed the Constitution,” Raffensperger said. “I think sometimes moments require you to stand up and just take the shots, you are doing your job. And that’s all we did. We just followed the law and we followed the Constitution and at the end of the day President Trump came up short but I had to be faithful to the Constitution. That’s what I swore an oath to do.”
Trump has gone after Raffensperger politically since attacking him over the phone. Trump endorsed Rep. Jody Hice, who questioned the veracity of the 2020 election results, but Raffensperger prevailed in the June 9 election.
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