The bombshell recording of President Donald Trump asking the Republican Georgia Secretary of State to “find” the number of votes he would need to win the Peach State (but not the 2020 election) was the “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” version of the Ukraine phone call that led to the impeachment of the 45th president, the State Attorney for Palm Beach County said Monday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
After co-panelists Neal Katyal and Joyce White Vance both said an investigation into the president’s one-hour phone call with Brad Raffensperger warranted investigation, State Attorney Dave Aronberg agreed that there was a “clear predicate to open a criminal investigation” at “both the state and federal levels.” Calls for such investigations have already been made. But Aronberg cautioned, as others have, that proving the president’s state of mind and intent would be a significant obstacle to prosecuting a potential criminal case.
Aronberg said a “prosecutor could indeed file charges,” but said “whether a prosecutor would is another question because there is some ambiguity on the president’s intent, and intent is an essential element here.”
“Indeed, his best defense is that he could claim that he really believes these lies. he believes this massive conspiracy that stole his votes and that’s why he was talking to the secretary of state about finding lost votes,” he said. “The problem though, as Neal [Katyal] said, is that he didn’t ask Raffensperger to find the votes. He asked him to find a specific number of votes. 11,780 votes to be exact, which is just one more than he needed to overcome Biden’s victory in Georgia.”
Aronberg noted that from here that former Attorney General Bill Barr, Trump’s former “election security chief” Chris Krebs and that “every judge that heard these claims [of widespread, election altering fraud], including ones [Trump] appointed, have rejected them, debunked them outright.”
The state attorney concluded by taking a dig at Rudy Giuliani and the Trump campaign’s infamous early November press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Pennsylvania, comparing that spectacle to the Trump call made Saturday and the July 25, 2019 phone call Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“So in the end, yeah, I think this was less than a perfect call. I like to refer to it as the Four Seasons Total Landscaping version of the call to Ukrainian President Zelensky, except here it was all caught on tape,” he said.
Trump, of course, said the Zelensky call was a “perfect call,” but it led to his impeachment. Many people are saying … that the Ukraine phone call was very similar to the one Trump made over the weekend.
Carl Bernstein, for one, said the latest call was “worse than Watergate.”
[Image via MSNBC screengrab]
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