WASHINGTON — Georgia took center stage once again during the Jan. 6 committee hearings Tuesday as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, testified about the events that followed the November 2020 election after former President Donald Trump lost in Georgia.
Much of the testimony centered around the now-infamous phone call Trump made to Raffensperger where he urged the secretary of state to find more votes, with Trump saying he knew he won Georgia.
“All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. “Because we won the state.”
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Georgia counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by a 11,779 margin Raffensperger noted: “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won.”
Channel 2 investigative reporter Justin Gray was also featured among the testimony for his report on a viral video from State Farm Arena that Trump’s lawyers and other supporters called a smoking gun, proving election fraud.
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani said the video showed election workers pulling suitcases being pulled from under a table.
Gray obtained not just the short clip the Trump campaign shared, but the critical hours before and after that clip as well.
He watched it with Georgia election officials, going through the video frame-by-frame to show everyone what really happened.
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The full video showed that the ballots in those boxes were sealed, and no fraud went on during the counting of those ballots at State Farm Arena.
Sterling also testified about the death threats he received as the state recounted the ballots in Georgia a total of three times.
At one point, he urged the president and other lawmakers to stop the violent rhetoric because someone was going to be hurt or killed.
The committee also touched on the 2020 plan to send a false set of electors to Washington, DC to vote for Trump.
Channel 2′s Richard Elliot was at the State Capitol that day where the fake electors met while official Democratic electors were meeting just upstairs.
Channel 2 Action News had no prior knowledge of the meeting, and it was only because Elliot was there for the official elector ceremony that he witnessed it.
The Jan. 6 Commission is investigating the alternate electors meeting and it’s possibly part of the Fulton County special grand jury’s investigation into potential criminal interference in Georgia’s election.
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