immediate steps that are being taken to try to keep gas prices under control. the other thing that continues, we think, to be very important, is to hold oil companies accountable. you know, just about everybody in this country is frustrated with the extraordinarily high price of gas, except for oil executives who have made it clear they re not going to invest in production when they re as profitable as they are. that s why the president has called for use it or lose it rules if an oil company is sitting on production permits or leases and not using it to do the kind of production that could lower the cost of oil, that they re held accountable for that. right now, there was unified, congressional opposition, but we think it s a good one that would make a difference for consumers who are feeling the pain at the pump. secretary, i know you re here to talk about transportation, but unfortunately many days we have to talk about gun violence, and so given the latest mass shooting
jake, that call that was on full display today during this hearing was, of course, the hour-long phone call that then-president trump had in january with these election officials in the state of georgia. mainly the secretary of state, brad raffensperger, who you heard from today. and i m told that despite what you saw today, which was the committee playing clips of that call with claims from trump saying thousands of ballots had been shredded or thousands of dead people had voted, and then flashing to raffensperger saying that s not true, we checked that out. that s also not true. trump has continued to defend that call. he has said it was a perfect call. he has told people he assumed it was being recorded. there were attorneys on the line as they were in this hour-lawn call where he alternated between asking for raffensperger to find these votes, thinly veiled threatening him when it came to certain pushback on claims he was making, and despite the fact you heard from them
of this behavior starts to look like a conspiracy to overturn the election, and that s the question. an unsuccessful illegal experience is still an illegal experience and that s, i think, what the justice department is weighing now, along with all of this other conduct. this is one slice of what we know happened as the january 6th committee laid out in those televised hearings. as hunter said, there s more to come. we ll be watching for that. now to the raffensperger subpoena, jack smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate donald trump at the justice department has sent a grand jury subpoena to georgia s republican secretary of state, brad raffensperger. the subpoena was confirmed by raffensperger s office asking him to provide documents. now, a source familiar with the matter tells nbc news it does not request him to testify in person. trump called raffensperger on january 2nd, 2021, demanding he quote find the votes to reverse
ken. but give me a sense of what this signifies, just the subpoena of raffensperger to turn over documents, the focus on him, and these other states. i think this is a very important moment in this investigation. until now, it hadn t been clear that the justice department was aggressively pursuing the conduct in georgia, given the fact that there s a state investigate down there. that was always a mystery, though. if it was illegal in other states, or potentially illegal. georgia was the best example, actually with the best evidence. they had the president of the united states on tape pressuring, trying to pressure brad raffensperger to find 11,780 votes, and if you remember from the famous conversation, trump also tried to suggest that they knew the election was corrupt, and it was very risky not to act on that. this is the guy in charge of the justice department at the time. he was almost hinting there was criminality if they didn t do
part of why we thought it was more important to present more of the totality of the these texts you have seen anywhere before, and our text team made sure you can see them in a phone as they were received, because the typos, the wild links, all of this is really important. and one last point, and this is something that shouldn t be lost in this discussion. we see the pressure. we see it in realtime in these texts on people like doug ducey, brad raffensperger, arizona attorney general. scott perry, the same guy sending this italian theory is talking about lobbying to have trump pressure the italian government and pennsylvania legislatures, and you know, i think one of the things we see is if these people had given into the pressure, all of this plotting just might have worked. mika, the information flow following this is scott perry hears video about an italian guy, he texts it to mark meadows. meadows brings it to the attention of the presidential of