he was told by local officials that he was not authorized to be in the room. and after he was blocked, meadows struck up a conversation with georgia s deputy secretary of state s office, office chief investigator, excuse me, francis watson, and got her phone number. now to watson s shock, the next day, trump called, and told her that when the right answer comes out, you will be praised. as the new york times reports, prosecutors have said that a special grand jury that investigated the matter had evidence showing that mr. meadows had set up another notable call. the recorded conversation on january 2nd, 2021, in which mr. trump can be heard telling mr. raffensperger that he wanted to find 11,000, 780 votes, that would allow him to win in georgia. and in 2021, during the january 6th committee s hearing, it was revealed that meadows had repeatedly pushed the justice department to conduct investigations, based on trump s unfounded conspiracies
using that, you ll see fund-raising e-mails go out. you see the text messages go out. and unfortunately it s sad because it s harmful for our country. we can t get past this moment of the lies that continue to spread. and you re seeing it. his supporters aren t wavering on this. i had to cut a vacation short to come back for this criminal indictment. not to complain. but you did not. you were on vacation. now you ve had a chance to read it. what do you think? yeah. i think that this case in particular is really strong. i feel like, i mean, we have him on audio literally telling the georgia secretary of state to find him 11,000 something votes. 780. yes, exactly. i think this is going to be a difficult case for him to try to spin his way out of. but as olivia mentioned, they try to say this is a weaponization of government. but to me this just looks 100% self-inflicted. donald trump got himself into this mess all because he
reporter: 11, 780. the exact number of votes that trump needed to win georgia. how are you taking this in? i realize there weren t the votes to find. we had checked out all the allegations so we knew we had the right results. reporter: raffensperger refused to budge. the challenge that you have is that the data you have is wrong. reporter: by this point raffensperger had overseen three different ballot counts and investigated more than 250 claims of voters fraud. the fact remained, trump had lost the state of georgia. all i knew is that we had to lean into the law and into the facts. and we had both on our side. then president donald trump made phone calls to a handful of elected officials in georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. he called francis watson who was an investigator in the secretary
enterprise. howie: joining us now to analyze the coverage in new york , rich lawry and in washington marie har, former state department spokeswoman and fox news contributor. rich the media is been in wall to wall mode since fani willis delivered these indictments and this is the case where trump tells gathering gary cohen secretary of state i need you to find 11, 780 votes. is this indictment having a big impact? it s bigger than some of the others. it s hard to keep track now, howard. howie: that s key and we do this for a living. we do this for a living. yeah, so it gives trump a short-term fundraising balance but we ve learned recently, you know, his funding has basically been drained by all the legal fees involved and the prosecutions and it gives him the attention of the candidates they all have to talk about trump that s all that matters and creates a sympathy effect among republicans and republicans think it s intuitive ly correct when trump was saying they could indict for
before he claimed that in dalton in 2021, he made that call to brad raffensperger, another georgia election officials who had to be republicans and trump supporters, and he had offered up a string of claims, as if they were indisputable, and these officials refuted each and every one. in apparent frustration, and apparently nothing to offer, he now made the infamous request, which apparently is one of the charges against. i just want to find, 11,000, 780 votes, which is one more than we have. because we won the state. he didn t. it s also worth mentally, that he made that call, and that claim in dalton georgia, after putin told by his own people, his white house attorneys, his election security people, law enforcement agencies, even attorney general bill barr, that there was nothing to his claims. and after a string of court defeats in georgia and elsewhere, 61 in all, including the supreme court. so now, almost three years after losing, he says he s going to produce, in his own