Trump Pressure To Change GA Votes Described On '60 Minutes'

ATLANTA, GA — Georgia's top two election officials appeared on "60 Minutes" Sunday to describe the pressure President Donald Trump applied to change the state's election results, review the evidence his campaign ignored that the count was correct, and comment on the tape of a call that was leaked to The Washington Post.

Last month, Trump called a Georgia election investigator and said they would be a national hero if they found evidence to change the outcome, but none was found, CBS' Scott Pelley said in the story. So on Jan. 2 Trump repeatedly demanded a call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked that he "find" enough votes to overturn the win by Joe Biden.

"I believe I said, 'Well Mr. President, the challenge is that you have bad data, our data shows that you lost the race," Raffensperger told CBS.

The bombshell call — in which the president said about 30 times that he had won the election — was taped by someone who leaked it to the newspaper. That person hasn't been identified.

Raffensperger, a Republican and early supporter of Trump's presidential ambitions, told Pelley he didn't know the contentious call was recorded.

"He was asking us to recalculate to get a different answer," Raffensperger said of the president's call.

Pelley wondered if he was being asked to join the Trump team in a conspiracy.

"I guess they were trying to intimidate and cajole me into something that wasn’t going to happen," Raffensperger said.

While the president repeatedly said 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, Raffensperger said a thorough check of all the state's death records showed only two votes were cast in the name of dead people.

Another conspiracy theory circulated nationally was that Georgia election workers brought in suitcases full of ballots to throw the race.

State voting systems administrator Gabriel Sterling told CBS that the workers were told to lock uncounted ballots in boxes before they left for the night. When the decision was made for workers to continue throughout the night, they removed the ballots, all while election watchers from both parties looked on.

Pelley asked Sterling how he would describe Trump’s claims. "Fantastical, unreasonable, lacking any basis in reality," Sterling said.

Trump named an election worker as a scammer who ran votes through a scanner three times. She is in hiding after getting death threats.

As rhetoric from the president and his supporters heated up in November, Sterling held a press conference to push back against the innuendo and growing threats.

"Someone’s going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot and someone's going to get killed,” he said five weeks ago.

What happened at the Capitol on Wednesday is exactly what Sterling was afraid of, he told Pelley.

The threats revealed Trump’s character and "that was a sad moment for me," Raffensperger said.

Fighting against Trump's bombast at rallies and on social media was "like having a shovel in your hand and trying to empty the ocean,” Sterling said.