Attorney George Conway said early Monday that a newly revealed phone call between President Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state indicates that the president is “delusional” and “desperate” during his final days in the White House.
“It’s shocking, but not surprising,” Conway said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The real question that pops up here and pops up, again and again, is how delusional is he? Is he that delusional or is this — or is he just desperate, and I think it’s a little bit of both.”
On the call, audio of which was obtained and published by The Washington Post on Sunday, Trump is heard pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, to “find” enough ballots to swing the state into his favor.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” Trump tells Raffensperger on the call. “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.”
Election officials in Georgia have said after multiple recounts and audits of the state’s November election that President-elect Joe Biden was the legitimate winner.
Raffensperger tells Trump on the call the data he is citing as he alleges voter fraud in places like Fulton County is “wrong” and maintains he and other election officials in the state are confident the contest was conducted fairly.
News of the audio sparked backlash among Trump’s critics, including some Republicans, and Democrats who allege the president committed a criminal act that is grounds of impeachment.
Conway, a founder of the anti-Trump political action group The Lincoln Project and a regular detractor of the president, said on MSNBC that motivations outside of overturning the election result might have led to Trump’s plea to Raffensperger.
“He is absolutely desperate to avoid leaving office on January 20th, and he’s delusional in the sense that he thinks this is the way to do it,” Conway said. “And the reason why he’s desperate, frankly, is because something more than him having to leave the grounds of the White House happens on January 20th. Something more important. He loses his immunity from criminal liability on January 20th.”
In separate tweets on Sunday, Conway, the husband of former top aide to the president Kellyanne Conway, called Trump “dumb as a rock” and said “the president committing criminal acts on unsecure telephone lines is the actual national security threat here.”
George Conway also ripped the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, saying he was “a moron and a disgrace” after Meadows celebrated the more than 100 House Republicans and nearly a dozen Senate members who say they plan to contest Biden’s victory when the Congress meets this week to officially certify the election results.
The Hill