Democracy on Trial: Gabriel Sterling (interview) | FRONTLINE

so let's start election day 2020 with where you are, did you vote in person that day who did you vote for? I voted early in person for the 2020 election because on Election Day I'm with the Secretary of State and our entire team in the war room made sure everything was working properly, especially for 2020 because it was the first time we used our new paper voting system because in Georgia before 2020 we hadn't had real paper ballots in 20 years. So it was a big deal and so I did it, I don't know, a week and a half before and it was easy.

I voted for President Trump and whoever was on the ballot with an R next to his name. I probably voted for I'm a Republican, so that's what I did and how it seemed from the inside that things were going that day, I mean, obviously, there's always, I imagine there's always problems and things that need to be fixed, no, that's the What there was no Pro there was literally no problems we had um we were using some tools we could see how long the lines were and literally I think that day the only problem we really had was later that day when there was an accident motoring. way down south Georgia and near Woss in We County and the thing is if you know that area it's where the Oki phoi is so when you have roads and there's a car accident on a main road to get to this location , they had to go 45 minutes out of their way, but literally other than that, everything worked, in fact, when it was all over, we were essentially in victory mode, you know, we were doing a victory lap because everything was going so well, everything It had gone so well, you know, we were already.

C we had already started tabulating the absentee ballots, so we were in a pretty good place, we were very happy with what had happened with G that day, the counties had done their job, we really didn't have any real problems with the elections. Day, uh, we were very happy, so that was the mood we are in now at the end of the day, excuse me, a problem came up in Fulton County, they told us they were going to stop counting the ballots and they're like why? what the hell would they do that? Then the secretary said to the television cameras that were gathered as if they know that some of us are going to work the rest of the night to do this, we think other counties should do it too and our director of elections for the state called the director of elections in Fulton County and told him why he is closing.

He asked, what do you mean by closing because they were in two different places? The elections director was in a warehouse and then on English Street. They were processing Election Day votes and then at State Farm, Arina was his deputy processing absentee ballots and he had decided at 10:00 that we were going to close it and then his boss Rick called him and Ralph Jones and told them they should stay longer and you can see this on some of the last security tapes that we all saw where this guy takes the phone call, you can literally see his shoulders slumped a little bit, it's like H, all these people have been here since What do you know, 700 in the morning.

I had to go tell him to work longer to get him to go there and this fell into the concept that no good deed goes unpunished because we were just trying to get them to do their job and then because of those actions it became one of the bigger actions. Conspiracy theories that seem to never want to die, but this was something you knew at the time. Yeah, I mean, we were all literally talking to the press about it. I mean, it was like there was nothing hidden about this, it was all very public. So let me ask you what was your, what was your job.

At this point, it was still the title of Voting System Implementation Manager. We had a lottery to find the most bureaucratic sounding name for my role and that, but I was sitting there trying to make sure everything was working correctly working with our election teams working with the counties um and again we made it because this was with the new machines. voting, it was the largest and fastest rollout of a new voting system in American history and we wanted to make sure it worked properly in the most important election in the middle of a pandemic with record turnout so we could achieve all of those goals and you mentioned that you voted for President Trump and anyone who had an R after their name, if you had always been a Republican, if you had come to the party in later years, um, I've been a Republican since I was nine years old, when Reagan He was running for re-election, so in Georgia that wasn't necessary.

The most popular position to be in since Jimmy Carter was from Georgia, but I looked around and said this guy was going to do a better job for us, so I was 9 years old when I first declared that my mother was not very happy with my father. I'm glad and throughout your career you've been interested in politics and I'm just trying to get a sense of where you are from my first campaign that I volunteered for. I was 15 years old, it was in 1986 with the re-election campaign for MC. madingley in 1988 I was 17 years old and I started at the University of Georgia and one of the first things I did was join the College Republicans.

I ended up being CEO of the president of the College of Republicans for three different presidents during the time I was working there. campaigns in the late '80s and early '90s, so yes, I've been in Republican politics as an operative and volunteer since before I could drive a car, so yes, I've been at this for a while, so tell me about your boss, about Brad Raffensberger. Well, who is he and what brought him to that position? I've known him for a few years when he worked in political consulting. His first campaign for anything was for City Council in a special election in John's Creek, um and John.

Creek is a bit of a small city, I think it's about 75 to 80,000 people just north of Atlanta, within Fon County, and I had been part of the campaign to make it a city and ran there. I was allowed to see seven elected officials in John's Creek when they started and I ran campaigns for six of them, so I was pretty embedded in John's Creek in North Fulton because I'm from Sandy Springs, which is a town just south of there that he was also just born in 2005 and he 'led that campaign to make it a city um so he ran for city council and he won and he served there for a while and then there was a special election for a state house seat in John's Creek because the woman who had the Riley seat had been chosen by the Governor to, I believe, run the Department of Revenue, so he ran that special election.

I was no longer campaigning at that time. He was out of that business, so he won the House race that served two terms. in the state house and decided he wanted to move on to something bigger and the Secretary of State's office was open and he decided to run for that, I mean, he had been a successful businessman, he was an engineer, which, you know, is kind of queer. for anyone in politics, because engineers are very mathematical, very linear, not always the most important personalities that exist normally think that politics are lawyers and that type of thing, so he brought a very different vision of how to run the office and Addressing the issues many times was very, very methodical and very logical, but he's also a very strong Christian, he's a very strong Republican, and he's very conservative, which has been kind of funny after all this to hear him called a moderate. or even hearing them call me moderate because I don't consider My Views to be moderated.

He has a line that he stole from someone else. I think he says he's conservative, but he's not mad about it, you know? So it's a different way of approaching it. those things so he's very close he's married to do good government follow the law follow the Constitution I mean he loves reading about the founding fathers and he's a traditional Reagan-type conservative Republican and I guess I am too, you know, I'm only 52 and it's weird to think that I spent, you know, 37 years of my life working on this stuff and the funny part was that as far as most of the topics and the way I approach things, I haven't changed. a lot, which is not good either. or something bad, I guess, depending on your point of view.

I've watched the game move around me in different ways. Do you think as we get into all of this, all the allegations about voter fraud and how you guys are responding to it? that the fact that he was an engineer shaped the way he responded to everything that was swirling around you. I think the fact that he believed in the truth shaped him more than being an engineer, now being an engineer allowed him to lean on the numbers and lean on the data that he was very comfortable with, so he was able to use that as a kind of springboard to discuss everything else, following the law, telling the truth and following the Constitution because the numbers are the numbers and as an engineer you can.

Not only can you not manipulate the numbers, you cannot recalculate them if there is no new data, so I think all that , everything that Brad incorporated into that, so that we get to the election tonight, do you know who won the presidential election? elections when we are late in the afternoon or early in the morning on election day, we didn't do it yet because it was so close that every election and again I've been doing this for a while, it was like my second or third time that some type of elections are held, they are not held but those elections are monitored.

People always forget a memory card. They always find a stack of ballots somewhere, not because of any conspiracy, but because they are human beings and there are literally hundreds of people dealing with thousands of volunteers. with millions of voters doing things, there will be errors and we and we have processes in place to catch them, so we have to reconcile these things and then we also knew that we had until Friday to get three other groups of votes and there were all the ballots that came from the absentees by mail, which is obviously huge due to covid coming on election day before 7 p.m.

They all had to be processed, signatures matched and then counted, so I knew there were a lot of votes that were still available, but to answer your question, when I found out what had happened around 3:00 the next day, I was sitting there watching what was happening knowing what was coming and I gathered the team together I said look President Trump is going to lose by about 10,000 votes and I was pretty close at 11,779 but that was my back of the envelope math of knowing the ballots that were still out and where they came from and the probability of what they were going to be, so that's when we knew we could foresee what was going to happen, not because, frankly, from our point of view, we were like fighting the last war because in 2018 we had a Democrat Stacy Abrams claiming voter suppression and that the election was stolen from her and she didn't concede, so we spent a lot of time and effort talking to left-wing Democrats saying don't trust misinformation.

These elections are going to be very precise. I mean, we spent a lot of time doing that and we didn't really think much about Republicans having those same problems, so we weren't fully prepared for what was coming, but we had an idea. What could come because of the claims being made elsewhere, let me back up for a second because that night you said you don't know who would win and if anyone knew you would, um, and because George is the key. state to win the presidency and um, that's the night the president comes out and says, frankly, we won the election, and he claims early in the morning.

I mean, what do you think when you hear that and you know what? Do you know anything about Georgia and where the vote is right at that moment for Trump and Biden? It was so close for about three days after three four days. No, neither side has actually claimed that Georgia was stolen yet because they would look like idiots if they did. Then everyone was silent for a while, until Friday, when the military ballots arrived and those are overseas and they are allowed to do so, as long as they postmark before election day, they can be accepted. until Friday and then you could also check the provisionals and then cure the absentees if there was any problem with them that Friday, so neither side really said much about that now Trump already said I won and now I read what was going on behind the In the scenes people were telling him just go claim victory and we'll find out later, basically it was what kind of thing was happening and my instinct was telling me that's what he was doing because I knew there was no physical way that Neither of them could do it.

I absolutely knew if they had won or not and I lived through the year 2000 and I remember in 2000 I was at a swimming convention for pool manufacturers and at that time I guesswhich was still very political. They saw me as the guy in the room who knew what was going on, so I remember getting up on a table and telling these people to say this is not over, Bush is going to win Florida. I tell them he's going to win Florida. I didn't know, but I mean. I felt like I knew and that's why I went through this before I was KN, you can't be sure, you can ask questions and that's what was so frustrating, there is a legal process to challenge these things if you have proof and I always assumed that if they went to do that, they would file, they would go to these states and do those things, and a lot of times, people would file things just for the sake of filing. um you know in 2004 there were people filing claims who voted. machines, this is going to sound very familiar, the votes flipped in Ohio for Bush have no evidence of that, but there were lawsuits filed and that kind of thing and I guess sitting now in 2023, looking at it from a historical perspective, I've seen what happened in the political world in general and I always trace it back to the Bor hearings, where one of the parties does something. the other side gets angry about it and says well I'm justifying the next thing I'm going to do by doing this and then the other side says oh no no, let's talk to you, let's justify the fact This is why the filibuster has exploded, it's the reason we have these kinds of hearings in 2004, there were like, I think, there were like 40 Democrats who refused to certify the presidential election, I mean, and then they look back and say, well, this behavior. it's on a different scale, I'm like guys, it's always going to be a different scale because it's another year and you're pushing the limits every time and both sides are undermining the institutions, no one is there defending the institutions, they're so hell-bent on it.

I have to have my president policy, I have to have my person, who will go to any limit and break any rule to do it and we are seeing the consequences of that now during the summer, when people start talking about it. some fraud in the campaign talking about the elections could be manipulated that the mail and ballots are not secure are you hearing those accusations? Oh, yeah, especially from the president, we're hearing those things, but I'm like, well, that's just political. Shit, I mean, I don't know what in my brain what I was saying was that you're being tactically stupid because your voters are older.

It affects older people. You're telling them not to trust the easiest way for them to vote. I was thinking in my brain that it's tactically idiotic to make those kinds of statements so early, especially and it was especially tactically idiotic because the Democrats had a strategy for using absentee votes before they were really going to focus on tactics. how to accumulate votes, which is a very smart tactic. The Republicans had no real strategy on that front and were undermining their own if they did so when Co struck. The Democrats were ready, not because of some conspiracy, just because their playbook already worked. in using these tools and they already had a lot of things in place and they were investing millions and millions of dollars to make it work properly, literally, if you look at what happened in Georgia, 28,000 people skipped the race, I think there were like 30 thousand and so many. people who voted for men in the primaries who did not vote at all in the general, your statements could have been enough to make those people's behaviors change, which hurt yourself and I know that you are guided by your instincts and not I think there's anyone who tactically tells you to do these things, make these statements, he thought it was the best thing to do, which again is very transactional and very dealing with what's right in front of your face and right in your face, it's just that It's not looking over the horizon at what this all means and I again, I'm looking back, I'm like, man, what the hell were you thinking?

Because it didn't make any tactical sense to make the claims that you're suppressing your own vote by doing that in the Democrat. side When Stacy Aens was making claims, it's a very different thing because she's saying they're trying to take away your vote, they're trying to suppress you as a normal human being and the normal American reaction is, well, screw what I'm going to do. . It's even harder now if they tell you your vote is being stolen, it doesn't count, you say, well what's the point you put your hands up? I mean, it just didn't make sense in how people approach their lives and how you tactically try to motivate people to vote, so let's go to that period after the election.

You said there was a period of three or four days where things were quiet and, um, you were talking to the press, I believe, and let me just say, they weren't. Don't worry, no one on either side knew what to do, everyone was up in arms in other states and in Georgia, they were like, well, we're waiting to see the winner. We are waiting for those absent. We're waiting for the um uh. overseas military voters and the problem was, and the people I try to explain this in my press conferences, there were, you know, I can't remember how many ballots there were now, I think it was like 177,000 that had been requested, about 8,000 They had returned. maybe 10,000 or something left and I said, look between Tuesday and Friday, it says it's going to be more than zero and it's going to be less than 10,000, no matter how many ballots there are, I have no way of knowing because they're in the mail, they just don't.

There's no way to know, but since that was so close to the margin, I think some people were saying that all those votes would go to President Trump, which they never said, that mathematically wasn't going to happen and it wasn't going to be all of them. So there were still things out there, there was still a possible reconciliation, but you could still find ballots that we found, you know, a few thousand ballots that went to President Trump, which reduced the margin from 14,000 to 11,779, so that was. through the reconciliation process and what we have to do because in Walton, not Floyd County, we saw on Election Day that there were about 2,400 people who had registered to vote early and those ballots were not represented in the things and We said guys, you have about 2,400 ballots out there, you need to go get them and you did because a machine had broken, you were intending to rescan them and you didn't, you just got caught up in your processes and you forgot again .

Human error is not a conspiracy and through our processes we found those ballots, they found those ballots, we added them to the totals and that's how President Trump got a little bit closer um and again across the country there are tens of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of volunteers. and millions and millions of votes there will be errors there will be errors we have processes to detect most of them but it is impossible with so many human beings doing something to avoid errors but there we saw nothing on the error side definitely nothing on the fraud side that any I would say that the result was in doubt in Georgia, so both campaigns are taking a step back and waiting to see what happens, but November 7th is the date that the networks announce the winner, it is the same time that Rudy Giuliani is in Four.

Seasons total Landscaping um proclaiming fraud in the elections what is happening at that time that day while the networks are proclaiming that the president um to win are you seeing things differently from your side? What are you thinking while you're looking there? Well, I'm thinking about checking out what's happening in other states and okay, the Whirlwind is about to come our way. I don't know what it will look like yet, but it will come to us and on November 9 we saw what that Whirlwind is. was going to look like I remember it in the morning I got a text message from someone who used to work in our office who was working on one of the senatorial campaigns and it was the press release with Senators Purdue and ller asking Secretary Rburg to design and I literally texted them haha, funny joke and they said no, no, this is coming out in like 5 minutes and I was like, why, why?

They didn't really list any problems, um and that's when it really changed and that was the day that Trisha, Raffensberger's secret wife, started getting sexualized death threats on her phone. The death threats started for most of us, so it was November 9th. As the day really the page turned into what we've all seen of the chaos after the fact that you once described it as a fucking breakup that day, yeah, how intense it was when, when that happened, it's hard for me. say it now because it all goes together, um and it wasn't fun, I can tell you that um and I was still doing the daily press conferences and stuff, and my role and my job at that time was to really give the information on the spot. prompt. the way we could and I remember the first press conference I did after the election.

I was kind of channeling into a West Wing episode one time where Alan Aldis's character was running for president and there was a nuclear accident and he said Well, I'm going to answer all the questions the press has until they're done and that was my first Press conference. Say I'm going to stay here and answer all the questions these guys have until the end. I can go back and watch on YouTube now, I literally mean at the end they're all beaten up, I mean they didn't have anything else they could ask, so my job was to basically answer all the questions until they had no more questions to ask. and we did it literally every day and sometimes twice a day trying to keep things going and explain what was happening.

And it wasn't fun having the Republican president and his team who we had, you know, voted for because we were all I mean, secretary rapb is a Republican, the staff is a Republican, not all, I mean, all the senior staff are Republican, so that when we got these hits it was like it didn't make sense, but I knew I was right and someone asked me one. period, I don't know, about a year or two later, I said, well, what if the people around you in the office said we should stop starting to do things? Now we should accept, stop the robbery, and I said that's not going to happen well.

What if I like it? Well, it wasn't going to happen because we weren't going to lie, we weren't going to cheat. And if? What if they said you know politically? We just have to do this. I said I would do it. I would have left it because it wasn't going to be part of a lie and so it was again, it's hard to come up with these hypotheses about that, but we were in the mix of a radicalized lie essentially and from November to December it just kept increasing. I received a FedEx package at my house which was crazy now so I had to call the local police.

They brought in four guys, including rubber gloves to make sure he was okay, like they like to stay away from him. I opened it. At first I didn't know what it was, but it was like a mix of electoral conspiracies and Chinese calls. It was like it was a strange package and you were receiving things at the office. We were receiving threats by email. Letters I remember seeing, you know, I'm not sure when the enemies of the people emerged. Enemies of the People was a website that had all these people involved in the election and I remember it was very strange to me because it started with Governor Whitmer.

He is number one, number two was me. I wonder why it's Governor Whitmer Whitmer and then I and then I looked and there was like 40 of us there and Brad and Governor Kim were much further down. I think this is not I'm, I'm, I'm target number two on the haters of the people site and the FBI found out they took it down in two days because the haters of the people site had our photo, a photo of our house. , our address. I listed our personal phone numbers and personal emails on the list. I remember I had a police car outside my house because I had been to the city council in Sandy Springs where I lived and I called the mayor and we'll talk to the Chief and see what we can do.

I couldn't get any real security, so when they

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ed me about whether he has security, I thought we don't talk about my security mainly because I don't have any security. but people didn't need to know that but you saying you don't talk about it makes it seem like you have a super secret plan for security um and it was weird to think about it that way and I didn't always know I felt like you know I'm handling this really well. , you know this is cool and one time my fiancé at the time came home at a time when I wasn't expecting her to come home and I heard the door open and I typed and I kind of jumped a little bit so maybe I was a little more nervous than I thought or gave myself credit for being.

I live in what I would call a Republican area, where there are a decent amount of Democrats there as well, it's a bit More Democrats are now posting Trump because a lot of people who used to be Republican switched their votes to Democrat and I got a lot of similar attacks when I went to the grocery store . It wasn't all that terrible, you're going to die. they were going tohanging, that was something they had, they used a lot of pictures of nooses when they made the death threats, that was a really big thing, but I mean, it made people thank us, so I got a lot of positive reinforcement in At the same time I was getting this negative attack, so I felt a little bit empowered, it wasn't like I was getting negative comments all the time, that helps me get over a lot of that during this period.

Is everyone listening? Are you investigating these accusations? Find something? Yes, we heard the accusations and one of the problems we had is that so many came. I mean, our office only has like 20 investigators and they don't just do elections, they investigate things about licensing, corporations, securities, cemeteries and all that other stuff, so we got inundated and the problem was a lot of them were fine. I was watching Fox News and they said this is not a real claim, it's not. something we can go investigate, we need to have people who have filed actual claims and as an example, there was a person from Cobb County who had been in an employee who said they told us not to do signature matches, okay, that's a real claim from someone who has real information in a position to know so we really focused our efforts on that so we actually did a signature audit in cob county because we had real factual evidence to go after the widespread claim that they use mailboxes .

Well, that was good because there was an emergency order that allowed them to use mailboxes. We don't match the signatures, well, do you have any proof of that? Well, we know they didn't and that's not a real thing, we can't investigate that. There was another one in particular. Now I love this too. There were signed affidavits that said. These things, the affidavits are part of a CH evidentiary chain and can be us as evidence if they can lead to other things. There was one woman who claimed to have seen pristine ballots that were not folded and stacked and were highly favored.

In Fulton County, it was on this batch number that we literally sent out two investigators who pulled the batch, looked at every ballot, none of them were spotless, came back to this woman and told her that we had investigated this batch and there were none that was not impeccable. There are all the regular absentee ballots in this lot, well, maybe then she laughed and said, well, I'm this lot, it's a lot number that didn't exist, so you can't check the half million these and there are also legitimate reasons to have. flawless ballots, emergency ballots will not be folded, provisional ballots will not be folded there, duplicate ballots will not be folded, so again a flawless ballot in and of itself is not a crime and one of the other things that happened was what had done Fulton County.

They had a CO outbreak in their warehouse about two or three weeks before the election and they turned to what they call plan C, where they printed an absentee ballot or a hand-marked ballot for each suppressed location because they were worried they wouldn't be able to do it. . to do the logic and accuracy tests on the computers on the machines that they finally did, but they had all these ballots in plain sight, all you know, wrapped in plastic, stacked together, labeled, people said they got all these fake ballots like no, those are actual ballots that went there for a purpose that they didn't need and that's not a conspiracy, it's not, I mean, and the fact that they're all sitting there, if they were there and then they were gone and If a new ballot showed up, that would be a problem, but there are all these specific things that we know we have, almost every ballot cast is tied to an individual voter, every absentee ballot was requested by an individual voter and one of them there's a lot of confusion because to a couple of things that people would send.

I sent absentee ballot applications to people who had already requested them and would receive them. I remember a phone call came in, a woman talked to our general counsel and said, "Well, I have like the ninth of these absentee ballot applications and I filled them out." Again and I sent it again, but what's really annoying is that I don't plan on voting absentee. I'm going to vote in person anyway and our council says no, don't submit this, it's not necessary, it's not required. because people would get confused by that and every ballot that went out was tied to a voter, every person who voted in person had to show identification, we reconciled the votes with the records and the signatures.

I mean, there are a lot of processes to We went through all of this and then when we did the hand count, that essentially helped in a really important way to shoot down a theory in Georgia which was that the Dominion machines were doing fractional votes or flipping votes because they basically gave exact results. It was a 0.53% discount on the number of votes cast and a 0.99% discount on the margin, which studies show that in a manual count you can usually have about a 2% discount because humans are terrible at telling things, but because we had votes. ballot marking device, which is easy to read and count, we were able to do those counts and we did it in 5 days and I think that really helped kill a lot of them, especially our elected officials who were really concerned about this because our people they were worried about this and that killed a lot of it, so that was good, but they continued to recycle this stuff like I had to hear about suitcases, magic suitcases with ballots coming out from under a table as a way to steal the election.

I mean, you know, it's the end of 2023 and I still see that on Twitter and I still see that in the emails about how they blocked the election in Georgia when it's like we have video tapes showing everything that happened in all these places and they say the election supervisors were kicked out, we have affidavits from the election supervisors that say we weren't kicked out, we just thought it was time to go, so we all got up and left, I mean, and then even at the presentation of Rudy Giuliani at At first one of the people said and here you can see that they kicked them out and started counting, which is illegal, it's not illegal, they can have monitors there, but they can continue processing without monitors there, so it's not.

Illegal, I mean, it's just frustrating because the laws are different in every state, which is actually a security feature because if all the laws and processes were the same, it would be easy for bad actors to violate them. I think we spent a lot of time trying. Working on that was very difficult to keep up with and I think I even said in some of the press conferences that it's like playing whack-a-mole, I mean, always because it's this one. I took it down three weeks ago. It's against it again, we knocked it down again, so you were never going to catch up because they would just recycle it because new people would see the claim the first time and there were Bots out there pushing it and you know everything. the things that keep that ecosystem of lies going when you hear this, this statement about the Dominion machines, what do you think of it and then why is hand counting important?

That statement from the beginning is totally ridiculous, um, so. The main thing is that through all of these processes we have a paper ballot, we have a record of how the individual voted, a ballot with a device to mark the ballot, which is what is produced when you vote in person, where you make a screen touch and it prints a ballot with your choices on it, you can see it or the paper ballot with the hand mark, which is the absentee ballot, there is a record of the voter's choice, so there is a little more of 5 million ballots cast in Georgia, which was a record and since we were in the middle of a pandemic which was pretty impressive, we were able to achieve that, so the claim was that the Dominion machines were flipping votes or doing what's called fractional votes, which made even less sense because if you had a fractional vote you would have 0 2 and votes and many these statements just didn't make sense, but that sounds, you know, villainous, we all hated fractions when we were kids, so fractional vote It sounds terrible, so what we did was the new law that was passed in 2019, called HB 316, that we had to do. an audit of some kind, so we had chosen a risk-limiting audit, was going to be what we were going to do and which state race we audited was up to the secretary and we could have chosen Chen any of the state races, but we all knew .

That would be a cop-out, we had to get into the presidential race, but because it was so close, the math required that the goal of a risk-limiting audit is that you only have to look at a certain percentage of votes to know if you're there. 90 or 95%. certainty that the result was correct, our level of confidence, so we basically chose to do the presidential election with a confidence level of essentially 100% at 95, we had to get like 40% of the ballots to get there, for which was logistically easier, literally. we hand counted every one of those 5 million ballots in all 159 counties so we organized it and we had a system called Arlo to upload everything and there have been a lot of misunderstandings about how this all works, you are not trying to recreate the election that we are trying to collectively demonstrate that the machines correctly counted the marked ballots.

All you're trying to do is prove that the machines did what we said they were going to do and validate the Victor. That's why you don't take it. It's not precinct level data, it's just on, we're taking all the ballots in every county, here's an aggregate count and because human beings do it, they absolutely know that there will be errors because, again, human beings Humans have terrible stories about things, that's why we move. to the machines to start with who to avoid human errors, so we did the manual count and in that manual count it showed that the machines absolutely counted the ballots as they were presented, which had a 0.53% discount on the total votes cast and 0.99% on the margin again if you look at the university studies, I think Rice University had the most comprehensive study on this.

When you do manual counts, usually 1-2% discount can be accepted, sometimes up to 3% discount, depending on money and size. of what you're counting and how many human beings are doing it because the thing is that the errors will even out over time because you don't have errors in one direction or another direction, but you go, you go. We're going to be wrong, and by being so close, it showed that the machines were exactly accurate for the ballots as presented, which eliminated that point of contention, at least for elected officials, members of the House of Representatives and the State Senate that I talked to that and showed them that, well, that's one of the conspiracies that we can put aside now for the voters, that it's still a conspiracy that exists and the ironic part to me was the reason it started this whole thing with Dominion.

It was a small county in Michigan called Anam County, where there was a clerk and it was a one-man office. It is a Republican county. He forgot to put a School Board race on one of his scanners in one of his precincts, so I ended up calling CEO Dominion. who put me in charge of their supplier V, which was a sub-supplier for them, which basically what they did was rebuild the election project and when you do that, they even told him: "hey, you can't do just this one thing on this one." scanner, she has to put the election bill on all of her scanners now, otherwise it will be read incorrectly, which is essentially what happened, she only put it on one scanner and even though it counted correctly on the scanners, as if the tapes were correct when you went to your reporting system on election night, entered incorrectly it's like if you have a formula set in an Excel spreadsheet and all of a sudden you remove a column, everything is going to be ruined, that's essentially what happened there and they could see that it was them.

I knew they saw that night and within 18 hours of finding out they had fixed it, reviewed it and rereported it, but because of those initial things that showed Biden winning Anam County, which was never going to happen, I mean to a 70% Republican county. I think he ended up winning it with about 60%, something like that that started and gave enough narrative for the Dominion systems to start changing the voting stories and they stuck with that because they saw they had those in Georgia. and in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, those are the places they were fighting over anyway, so it was kind of a perfect storm that human error blew up into a whole set of conspiracy theories and this kind of shows you the danger. about these things and the power of social media and having a relentless person tell you the story over and over again and by the time you've told it by hand, that should definitely leave you alone, but it doesn't.That was my next question, you said one person relentlessly repeated it over and over again.

I'm talking about the president of the United States tweeting general accusations and very specific accusations of fraud during this period. What is the effect of Donald Trump obviously tweeting, obviously it has a tremendous impact on his voters because no one wants to lose lose, everyone wants to be on the winning side and it is assumed, especially now, with how isolated our culture is, that It goes back to that New York Times story from 1972 where the woman from Manhattan says I don't know how Nixon got everyone I know to vote for a government. It's like we're all in that situation now where we Democrats, Republicans don't interact with each other, so literally every Republican knows only other Republicans who voted for Trump, how could he not have won in our state?

That doesn't make any sense, so there's a long history of accepting it if your side loses, the other obviously cheated because no one you know voted for those guys, so that's part of it. The reason we have this problem now is that people are criticizing the institutions and there is no one defending them or they only defend them when their side wins. I mean, I'll say this for Secretary Raffensberger and our office. I fought Stacy Abs' claims and one in court, as we literally won in court, every single one of his claims were dismissed. We fought Trump's claims in court.

All of those things were dismissed or withdrawn. We are defending the institutions that we are defending. We are defending voters' rights and we are being attacked from the left and the right which makes me think we are probably doing a good job but in 2020 I want to say these are accusations like no other but the question is is it coming from above because voters distrust or it is the president's constant tweets that constantly talk about it. D is driving it, but it is fertile soil, which is why it is absorbed so easily. I'm trying to look at it from both sides, I think if he thought it wasn't being absorbed he would have found a different tactic, he would have used a different set of stories to try to do it um and but the thing is it was such fertile territory that he put it on easy.

He saw himself gaining ground with his base and I always wonder why he was raising tons of money at the same time, and this money was supposed to go towards the legal fight. and all that kind of stuff and I don't know what percentage, but it's actually a very small percentage that you go to these small dollar donors over and over again send $5 now send $25 now and your surrogate is doing the same thing I mean, Rudy is raising money, Michael Flynn is raising money, everyone is raising money for these things and that's why they have incentives, the incentives are backwards, the incentive should be to tell the truth and follow the law and then be rewarded by the American public and that is not what is happening now, they are you, if you tell these lies and people agree with what you say because it is the result they want to see, they will give you money and your favors will increase even with them.

As their disadvantages increase with the rest of the country, the results are different on those fronts. I mean, look at Marjerie Taylor Green, she's one of the most successful fundraisers in Congress and she relies on saying over-the-top radical things to get clicks and attract people. I like CU like yes. Stick it to them, so the incentives are backwards. Same thing with AOC, she said, she says crazy, radical things on the other side and raises tons of money, so being a methodical, boring law following a ruling person doesn't get you clicks. and he likes it, he just doesn't because it's boring, what do you think of this now?

Something that maybe you didn't know before, but if you say Dominion, any of them, if you go and look at the January 6th committee, others, what they told Chairman Jason. Miller, even Mark Meadows, Kaye mcin Bill, prohibits the Attorney General from repeatedly telling the president that claims you know he was repeating were not true. I mean, now that he looks back and has lived through that moment that you described, what does he do? What you are doing is that very respectable officials told him repeatedly that the claims were not true, it was not what he wanted to hear, it was not what he wanted to hear, he chose to hear the things he wanted to hear.

Listening to J's mind, does that make him more responsible? Look at President Trump being 100% responsible for all of this, his behaviors, his inability to accept the fact that he really lost and what's frustrating to me as a Republican is that since he was elected, we. they handed us our heads, we lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost the presidency, I mean, in most of American history, when your leader loses the election, the party says maybe we should stop doing that if is making us lose the election, but instead they are doubling down, so let's go to the run-up to the December 1 press conference.

I mean, you talked about the threats, if things were getting worse as the end of November approached, what was it that we were seeing that was so worrying, well, it's hard to say because it's like you go numb afterward. of a time. I think it's kind of a human copying mechanism when there's so much chaos around you and I remember saying one to each new threat. Like I'm stacking it like firewood in the back because it's just oh, here's another one, okay, stack it up here, here's another threat, stack it up here, I think I know what made me lose control that day I was in the lunch. in a small place near the capital and it's a place where lobbyists don't usually go and elected officials don't really go, so that's part of the reason I like to go because they don't bother me.

That and I remember getting the phone call from Dominion's VP of operations, who was, you know, she, Gra, Naval Academy, got an NBA from MIT, had come out of the gaming industry, I mean, she was tough as hell. a nail and there I was for myself. mind quite agitated by UNF, but when she called, her voice shook audibly and I could see that or hear that she was upset by what she was telling me and like when I first heard the words, you know one of our young contractors at the Gwin County. he's had a threat against him and you know, I think his name is pretty unique so now they're like threats to his family and I said, well, I'll look it up and again I piled it up with the firewood of other threats I was saying but when I scrolled through Twitter and I came to the threat I remember it clear as day it is as he said the name of the young man you have committed treason may God have mercy on your soul and it had a slow turn GIF of a rope like the sun and for some reason I think that because this young man He didn't sign up for any of this like a lot of the poll workers, poll workers, he hadn't signed up for this, he signed up to be an IT expert working on things in an election system and when I saw the videos of the men talking about them and they were almost using some racist tropes in the middle and I saw that thing, I just remember when I get angry, I go The red start goes around here and it goes to the base of my ears and my boss Jordan merges with me and tells me : You seem quite angry.

I'm like I was pretty angry, so he called the secretary and said Gabe wants to say something like that. It's starting to get out of control and I don't know what getting out of control meant, but I guess getting to that level where a contract worker is getting death threats, that puts things over the edge for me because the secretary or I are getting death threats. , we're on TV, you know, we put ourselves out there, it's not right, but I'm not going to say I understand it because it's never acceptable, but I'm ahead of things to say.

Hey, I'm saying things you didn't want to hear, so get mad at me. I guess this guy literally took a job to make some extra money and for him to be in the line of fire seemed patently unfair and morally wrong, and I guess on top of that. period, my intellectual side was saying this is starting to escalate and escalate and escalate, this is going to get out of control and that's why I felt the need to say something and again I'm trying to intellectually reconstruct what I was feeling at that moment. now it comes three years later, but and maybe some of this selective remembering, I'm not sure, but that's what I was going through, what I wanted to convey is that they have to eliminate these things and in retrospect.

Now, the moment I said, you're getting bad information, aren't you, aren't you, you lost this election. Now, hearing people in the know tell him repeatedly that he had lost the election, and yet he insisted on doing this, was even more infuriating. to a certain extent and what do you say because you have a direct message to the president and you say, Mr. President, what were you trying to communicate? What were you saying? Enough is enough, be an adult, suck it up, fight in court. I don't want people to bully people or use threats or violence or that kind of language because it will escalate and spread because like I said before, going back to the way I look at these things, they always escalate, one side does one thing. and the other. side does something else, they justify the next thing they do and so on and so on and there is never an adult in the room saying enough is enough and I think I struck a chord that day, although it was a little funny because I didn't realize it until many hours then because my fiancé at the time my now wife had received a job offer that day and I told her at 11 in the morning that today is about you, baby, let's go.

I went out to dinner and I did wonderful things, so I literally turned off my phone, I turned off the ringer and from 4 to 11: and I saw a friend of mine when we went to dinner and he said: Hello, great job today and I guess he had seen me on local television because at that point, you know, it had been like a month and a half. I was on TV doing stuff, um, and then I came home and I got texts like, oh, you're trending on Twitter. I like it great, what does that mean? So I looked it up and I went from about 2,000 followers on Twitter to about 30,000 and it went international, so it was a little strange, but back to trying to tell the president what presidents are supposed to be. to be the best of us, they are supposed to guide us through difficult times, not create difficult times, they are supposed to be an example for our citizenry and our children, not be a warning to them not to do this and that It is what it was. was happening and it was one from my own party and it was frustrating and I remember I didn't have a script, in fact I didn't realize I was going to call the president, the senator said he was literally saying the words out loud at the time um and I remember saying one point, if you're asking about the leadership position, show something and I felt frustrated.

At that point I broke down and it became a bummer after that, it just did. I think the whole thing was maybe 20 minutes or so and I was angry and I'm still angry but I'm not going to talk about it, it's been three years, it's unfortunate because I think it's hurting the nation, I think it's hurting my party, I think that is hurting the values ​​that I have fought for, you know, almost 40 years of my life and I am not going to stop being a Republican. I'm not going to stop fighting for the same things I've been fighting for all along, but some of the most important ones.

In that we are following the Constitution following the rule of law telling the truth and as long as I breathe in my body I will continue doing the same. Did you think that the president, the man you voted for, simply did not understand the effect his words were having and What if you could explain to him that maybe you could change something. I don't think it was that logical. I think he was. I'm not trying to justify what he's doing. I've been trying to intellectually understand where he probably was, it was his mind, he was fighting for his political life and he had no limits in doing that, which shows you what happens if you don't do it. having boundaries boundaries are really good things to have um in hindsight now that we have more of this information it's frustrating it's unpleasant um your own selfishness has caused so much chaos your own selfishness has caused the problems that we've had um and I know there are millions of followers who They love him and part of the reason they love him is because, quote, he's a fighter, he fights for us and I think again, another thing that I think the media and the left have never really understood is that this adoration comes from He and much of her is 50 years old in this culture.

People who share my values ​​feel like they've been kicked in the face. They feel like the media is laughing at them. Liberals think they're all idiots and they tell them so you know you watch MSNBC, that's the feeling you get is that anyone who believes things that I believe are idiots and Reagan fought for the things that these people believed in Gingrich did, uh, Paul Ryan, the local congressman did it, but what Trump did was he hit the other side of the mouth and there was a kind of enjoyment of that because they had never had that out, no one really hit him in the mouth.Reagan was funny making fun of them, but Trump was like screw you guys.

I'm Hitting is just and it was a level that they hadn't seen in a long time and it made it feel better because like someone was finally really hitting back at these guys and putting them on their heels and that's part of the reason why they love it. . them and the other thing I don't think they understand was out the door and this is me, Gabe Sterling, you know, a prominent person who criticizes Trump for things in the leftist media, he didn't have a honeymoon at the time that started the Russia gate, which as we now know was essentially nothing more than a made-up thing that came out of the Clinton campaign, but they rode that horse for years, so Trump felt justified and pushed some of these things.

They're going to lie about me. I'm going to lie about. them and everything is fair because that is what they did to me and no one reports me. They accuse me of both earthquakes because I see both parties doing bad things and they justify it because they care a lot about the values ​​they want to fight for. I am going to forget the truth, forget the law, forget the institutions. I just have to win and that is a problem we have. The institutions are there to prevent the country from falling apart. If we destroy institutions, both sides do it.

Both sides will end up losing. we lose the way the country is supposed to run and one of the things I hate is and this has been happening for 50 years gradually, gradually, incrementally, one of the problems we have now is Barack Obama saying I have a phone and a pen so that executive orders in one direction mirror the next president's executive orders in the other direction, so that we lose much of the stability we have had for 200 years in our country and Trump's outcome from these things is unfortunately almost a logical result because there are no longer any barriers if they are going to lie.

So, then it's okay for me to lie because I'm lying to do the right thing in the end and the Democrats say the same things and they always win or lose. That and these Zero Sum games that we have are going to end up biting us all, it damages the nation and it damages our ability to get things done and that is the result, that is what is really terrible about the lies around the 2020 elections, I mean, like you. I know that moment was big at the time and it's big in hindsight because of what happens on January 6th.

Was it obvious to you? So it should have been obvious to everyone that you were warning about the potential for violence about the potential for how you say someone is going to get hurt someone is going to get shot someone is going to be killed, that is, say you were so pre-I It was like it wasn't so pre-professional. I have read a history book. I mean, it's not hard to see when people turn up the heat like this and turn up the heat. People react. It's like that. It doesn't take a magic crystal ball to see the results of this type of language in this ongoing set of people's emotional turmoil.

This is what is happening. I suppose that. I was a Republican who was very vocal against, you know, my president and that's why I got more coverage, but it doesn't take much to see that that was going to be the outcome of this and unfortunately that was ultimately the case. Um and little things have happened here, I mean, still to this day there are people resigning from their positions and election offices because they can't deal with it anymore and we're losing institutional knowledge, which then leads to more problems with elections. . which then fuels conspiracy theories, um, it's not rocket science.

When people's emotions are high and they say that guy did it, you're going to go after that guy, it's a lot of human nature and Trump does a great job of toying with people. emotions about that, when and using human nature, I mean, it's true if you had done or the secretary had done what was being accused, rigged the election, stole the vote, if you know that an enemy of the people committed treason, those those are pretty serious accusations that they were constantly being leveled yeah I just want to know where all my Chinese money is you know they accused me of taking millions of yans and it's obviously AB absurd um but the incentives are wrong a lot of people get clicks .

I mean this. There are certain two Twitter accounts that constantly keep churning out this, no quotes, no links, at least something, they go to the trouble of putting links to something, you know, and it's there every day, I mean, you just sort it. At this point, I'm immersed in it, you know, it went down for a while until 2022 and then from 2022 onwards, it really picked up again. I guess in the buildup to 2024, Donald Trump kind of flew under the radar after giving that. speech because one of the things that he hadn't realized, but it was in the j6 report, was that he retweets a video of you issuing that warning and uses it to say that you know there was a rigged election.

It exposes fraud in Georgia, but did you notice from that moment? forward about the danger of their rhetoric and the potential for violence. I don't know if the president would tend to listen to the Georgia voting system implementation guy, you know, warnings like that, it wasn't just me, his own staff was telling him he lost the election, his own staff was watching what he was doing. happening, he chose to ignore people, I mean, he chose to go down this path and despite his flaws, he has very good instincts for understanding what his base of the American public is. he wants to hear and see and you can't rule that out and he's gone back to raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

He is the leading contender for the Republican nomination right now. I find some irony in this, if he hadn't said anything, I think he would have. He would be returning to the nomination right now and even returning to the White House if he had said that he had taken the loss and owned it like Nixon did in 1960, but I don't think he would be able to do that. I think he must have done it. the line light on him all the time, whether good, bad or indifferent, I guess he follows the old policy that there is no such thing as bad publicity, you know that, but it's in hindsight, I mean, now I could say it wouldn't be So. because other people would fill the void that maybe they would have um and even at that time in my speech in December I said listen, you want to run for free elections, well, go ahead, stay fighting your fight in the courts, but what you don't want what there is What to do is let people use intimidation and threatening language and physical violence because that's just wrong and he would never take responsibility for any of this, you know, up to this point he said on January the sixth, what was the problem, what Which is crazy to me, I mean.

I worked on Capitol Hill, that place is, you know, a sacred place, it's the people's home and what happened with it was a disgrace and he had the opportunity, he turned it on, he had the opportunity to stop it, he didn't, He disappeared for several hours and didn't say anything. We have transcripts of the text messages and calls he received. I mean, he knew what was going on and it seems to me that he enjoyed it, which says something more about him than anyone else. Also, two days after you said that not only have they not backed down, Rudy Gilani is having hearings with the Georgia legislature, he and many others are spreading a number of conspiracy theories right now, what was your reaction?

Well, I remember when we first found out that we had a Senate hearing that morning that lasted three hours. Our general counsel R in Germany answered most of the questions and it was a typical Senate subcommittee hearing. Normal, you know, this is what happened, these are the things that happened. I heard these things and this is why it didn't happen, which was a very normal low-key hearing, we came out of it and kind of hey, Rudy Giuliani is here. I wonder why Rudy Giuliani would be in Georgia. It doesn't make sense to me and then I didn't go to the hearing that I heard about after the fact and show the videotapes and acknowledge everything that was happening.

I think this is not fraud, this is normal and yes, it was very like that. It was very frustrating to see everything that happened and I heard that they had the 48 Hours of those security tapes the same way we had the 48 Hours of security tapes that we were methodically going through documenting things making schedules and stuff and it just went out there. with what they had and anyone who looks, knows, looks at everything, knows that there was no fraud there and if they had things that they didn't understand, they could ask questions like one of the most important parts wasn't just the magic suitcases. which were actually just ballot bearers that had been put under the table about an hour earlier because everyone thought they were going to come home with numbered stamps, so the chain of custody was maintained so that nothing would ever happen with those things that at that time the video cameras were still in it and were placed down there with the monitors and the press in the room.

The secondary part of that was that they are scanning multiple times and a standard operating procedure is if there is a scan error. you delete that batch and you straighten it out like you do and then you go through it again and that's what they were doing and the reason we know that's the case is because we had a hand count that showed the number of ballots that matched what was counted , so I know they didn't do that um and at that point we already did it so that was already out of the way that was something demonstrable that hadn't happened and they just kept going because they took videos hard and then they did it they cut into a 30 second ad and started broadcasting it all over the country to raise money, I mean, and I'll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied, they looked into the eyes of the state senator, Georg's people, people from United States and he lied to them about this and they knew that they were lying to try to keep up this charade that there was fraud in Georgia, I mean, even if they didn't know that particular day that you're going, I think he works with a local television station. come out, show the video, post the video, I mean, you had me file the case within a day, that's right, which was about two days, yeah, yeah, it's about two days, I think because again we had to review, We were documenting everything because Do we have any law enforcement capabilities because we have post-certified officers, and you know they carry guns and badges and investigate things, so we have to be responsible when we make claims?

They should be responsible in their claims given the functions they perform. They have chosen to be irresponsible and, frankly, I think they knew they were lying, especially after that case, and they kept saying it for months, so I think they knowingly lied to these people to try to keep the Tip Drill going. there was fraud in Georgia here Ruby Freeman Shay two election workers who see their lives, you know, overwhelmed. I mean, when you see that's exactly what you were worried about, right? That's 100% what I was worried about and not just that, I mean. There were situations in other counties in Georgia like, you know, broken windows and cars, was it a robbery or was it someone trying to intimidate?

You know, the dead squirrel left on your porch was either someone a squirrel just died or someone trying to. things we can never really know, but his sense of fear was so intense that everything became like this. People thought they were being followed home, they would like to do risky things to get away from people and we had cars in the second round of elections trying. to cut off vans carrying absentee ballots from mailboxes, I mean, it was becoming more and more dangerous and that's the kind of thing I was talking about and it wasn't just in Georgia, it was across the country where we saw that was happening in Arizona with PE people who were armed and legally allowed, but they were standing at drop boxes, kind of intimidating, um and it just kept escalating and again, none of this was hard to see seeing what was happening and the bad part was for me or a The bad part is not the bad part, but the bad part was that many people who believe these lies are people I care about, who are friends, family who I have known for years and try to discuss with them and talking to them about things, I mean.

I remember there was one that I talked about on January 6th and it was a friend, not a family member, that polite person we sat him down, okay, this is what is happening in this particular case, okay, I understand that no It was fraud, what happened in this particular case. I understand it wasn't fraud, there were like five or six different things we walked him through and he agreed. I understand that now that it wasn't fraud, he eventually leaves, but I know in my heart that he was fooled. I'm fine, I can. I can't get over your heart.

Can. I can appeal to your brain. I can appeal to your logic. I can appeal to your thought processes. I can't get over it if you believe it in your heart. I do not know how to do it. flip that, no matter how much evidence I show you, it will never be enough. Did you know anything about the so-called fraudulent electors at the time when there was an effort to separate itself from challenging the results, but an effort to put together an alternative list,Would you mind any of that? Well, yes, because this is one of the things I find a little more incredulous.

Most of the people in that room were there because the lawyers said, "Hey, we have to protect our rights if our election challenge comes." Through that, we had to do these constitutional things and they kind of made it not seem so strange to me, it made sense that it was in the room, literally, where the secretary's office crashes into the room where they did this and we knew. in real time now again, the people in that room, most of them were just voters who were told by Republican lawyers, "This protects our rights, it's no big deal, now what they did with it in DC is a very big story." different trying to get it. the list of electors to get the vice president to accept them as opposed to the other electors, but the people who did that I don't think they had any idea that that could be used that way, honestly, some of them may have, I mean.

I'm not sure what the complexities of those discussions were, because interestingly we had a situation in, I want to say, May or April, where a couple of DC journalists had called our office saying, are you hearing anything about? kick this state legislature or have different slates of electors, I tell you to shut up, crazy, no one talks about that, but it seems like there might have been discussions as early as May in DC about how we do this if it goes in those directions. And again, part of this is that I didn't consider Georgia to be in play, it just didn't occur to me that it would be that close in Georgia.

I mean, it kind of did, but Georgia had been read pretty reliably and you know. Stacy ARS was close in 2018, but one presidency the dynamics of turnout changed, but I guess Trump had pissed off a lot of people with the way he went about his business and you could see it in the election results afterwards, nothing was crazy For me, I mean. he lost by 11,779 votes and there were eight counties in the metro area, six in the metro area and two around the University of Georgia, in which David Purdue got 28,000 more votes than him. I mean, people made conscious decisions and I will vote for the rest. of the Republicans I'm not going to vote for this man this time and that's why he lost and he just couldn't accept it and the partisans couldn't accept it, so in the lead up to the infamous phone call, um to the secretary, I mean, at this point the Supreme Court has intervened in the Electoral College, it has intervened where at the end of December she is tweeting, you know, I think she calls Psyrburg an enemy of the people um in a tweet she says she has the votes to flip Georgia , is calling investigators to his office.

I mean, what's the pressure? Because it seems like it should be done at that time, but it seems like you're still under tremendous pressure from the president of the United States. I think it was an attempted maneuver to try to put pressure on us but at that point he already called for the resignation of the secretary who had called him an enemy of the people he had converted, I mean, basically, he addressed the population of Republican primary voters in Georgia, He said this guy is terrible, I don't know what else he could have thrown, maybe he got a kitchen sink somewhere and threw it at him.

I mean, how much more pressure can there be and we were never going to break, we were never going to break, it didn't occur to us because we were following the law, we had, we took an oath to follow the law, tell the truth and follow the constitution, so It really matters how much pressure was exerted because that's not the role, it shouldn't matter, he's not a legislator being pressured to vote one way or another on a bill that would make sense. it's like if you did these things under the law and you swore an oath to do that, it should never matter how much pressure you are under for it and anyone who gives in to pressure like that and goes beyond his oath has done himself a disservice. to their voters to themselves and to God, I mean, they take an oath to God when they do these things, I mean, and that's a big deal and the secretary was never going to waver, which is why I loved it on the phone. call where basically the challenge you have is that your data is incorrect, that means that and to the engineer and Brad and the guy who follows the law and the rules that was as simple as it was, it was an 8C phrase that goes back to 56 minutes of ranting for that to erase everything, but there's no doubt about all that pressure, I mean, when you say you took an oath, you knew what the law was, but the request was asking to do something illegal, were you asked to violate your The oath is that what the pressure was intended to do listen, I couldn't tell you for sure because I do know this.

I don't think the president is a lawyer because he is not a lawyer and the good lawyers he had around him were. After listening at that time, I think we all realized that there was no mechanism in Georgia law to do what he asked was to recalculate that, that doesn't exist, there's no way that suddenly no, no, no It matters because we had certified the election, we were done, there was nothing else to do, there was no legal recourse outside of a court case to reopen all of this, so technically speaking, if he had done any of what the president asked of him, he would have been a rape. of the law, did Trump fully understand or understand?

I can't be sure. I do know that at this point everyone of any kind around him had told him that he lost the election, I mean, Bill bar flat out. said the State Farm stuff was bullshit at the time we heard there was kind of two camps around Trump, there was like a normal team, which was fine, you lost, you know, that includes the Jared Kushers, Ivanka Bill, those types of people and it's time to You know, get ready to transition, move on to the next thing and then there was essentially the crazy team that was like they stole it, it was the Russians, the Chinese and the foreign influence, the fraud vote scammers and all these other colorful things and he chose to go after the vote scammers even though all the real evidence from the actors responsible said that no, no, you've lost, it's time to move on and finish, so the pressure that comes on us again, people have talked to me about the pressure before and I think it was there, but it wasn't like it was going to have an effect, but I and I think Trump didn't understand it just doesn't fit with him, that someone wouldn't do it. he just gives in on CU.

I think that's been his business practice for 50 years, you hit the deep end, you do everything you can to get the transaction done the way you want and I think it was so foreign to him that he just lacked understanding that you could hear the frustration of the phone call like, "Give me a break, guys, and you're Republicans, you're right, you should." I'm serious, it just didn't occur to him that there was a higher level of loyalty to the law. and the Constitution and it really showed because I figured I don't know at some point, a few months later, he said we should suspend the Constitution to reinstate me.

I said, come on, you know, that's not how this all works. And is it difficult for the secretary to understand the other part of the president's perspective, because even if he didn't know what Bill Bar told him, even though he said it publicly to the AP at the time, the secretary is saying it? You tell him, you know each of the accusations that the president has. There is an answer. Is hard to understand? I say this because it seems that he is not particularly interested in the reality of the accusations. Is it difficult to understand his perspective?

I don't understand. what was his perspective his perspective was: I don't want to be a loser and if I admit it then I'm a loser. One of the worst things in Trump's life is being a loser and now he has lost the presidency that he lost. the strength of the house lost the Senate, I mean, since he touched everything in our party, he's kind of a loser, so this is the last thing he has and you know, you think if you're in that role and you try to say: " I wouldn't be a better person than me, I don't know, I mean, if I saw a way, I think I would do the right thing.

I'm pretty sure I did the right thing and since I've been through this particular

trial

by fire, I'm really sure. that I do the right thing, but until you're there and you think that if I lose, all these terrible things will happen for the American people and I'm trying to justify and I even go to court and do the right thing. I'm sure their voters are. absolutely sure that they will be heard, but that's the route you have to take to go to court. You can't just make accusations and throw them around and wave them around, you know, all this makes everyone angry and you have no evidence. , every time they tried to go to court they would take their things, try to do tests or, many times, something frustrating for them.

I'm sure they were fired for lack of standing, which was because they never did. They present their evidence and they've used it as a justification like, oh the courts are against me, it's like no, you just didn't use the tools available because you had shitty lawyers around you because all your good lawyers said This is stupid, Don't do this with shitty lawyers who didn't know what they were doing in many things, but when you listen to that phone call, it becomes clear to you that it is more than a question because there is a threat, it talks about what you are doing is criminal, this is a big risk for you, it's the president threatening the secretary, well I think it's ironic that like all men my age I'm a Godfather fan and you know in the scene in The Godfather 2 when they were talking You know, the big boss never orders anything, he says, hey, that guy Paulie, he's kind of a problem, you know, he just says that and then Paulie leaves, so you don't have to be explicit about these things, I mean, but yeah, I mean, it was obvious that this was something criminal for you and potentially for your lawyer Ryan.

I remember very clearly when I heard that I said okay. That's not good, I mean, because think about it, this is the president, he oversees the Department of Justice, you don't know what they can or can't do considering everything else they've been doing, so again, I can't go in. his brain I don't know for sure I'll never know for sure but that was smart if he can easily say I should never have been a threat I was just asking questions or it can be if you want to go back to the person who was obviously a threat and you should know better, but I'm not, I'm never going to tell you that, so it was cleverly done.

I'll give him credit for that, but I mean the intention was there. I mean, any lawyer around him would have told him that it was over, at that point they were going to certify the election on January 6th and now, looking at his first tweets that said things like it was going to be crazy on January 6th, It wasn't like that. setting this up was again tactical logic to try to get things done and again seemed like a top drill. I mean, I don't think that just getting over the fact that a few thousand people attacked the capital wasn't going to change the outcome of these things, but it changed the tenor within Democracy itself and our entire Republic has been affected by it.

I don't know what the end of a lot of this stuff was because it didn't really make sense because even if we say we did 100% of what he wanted to do in Georgia, he still loses, he has to get Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, one of those other ones to have enough electoral votes and all those ships had sailed, you know, and because of bad lawyering, he didn't do some of the things he should have done to try to keep her alive if he would have if he thought there was real evidence of fraud or actual evidence of theft did you hear the conversation in real time or did you hear about it from Secretary Raffensberger after it happened?

Like wow, I just got this call, well what happened was I was on the phone, it was a Saturday and I was on the phone with my direct boss Jordan and she was like, “Oh, I have to go, we're getting a call with the president in In a minute I thought, wait, wait, what a click that was. I was like this for about 18 hours I was furious I said I should have been on that call, damn, because I know more about this than anyone else who's ever been on. on the call, then I remember the Washington Post got it and I put it on my computer, on my coffee table, and I was yelling at the computer while I was listening to the call, he's not right, tell them this, do that in retrospect, now I'm very, very happy that I wasn't on that call, just looking at it now because I think the tone and tenor that Ryan and the secretary took was perfect in dealing with the response to that, like I told him saying that the challenge that you have It's just that your data is just wrong and it was just that I even killed the engineer.

I'm just following the rules and dealing with what was essentially a rant, you know, I mean, I hadn't heard the call in a couple of years until I did it. I don't know, it was a few weeks ago and I actually remembered it as a snicker because it sounds so crazy that the president sounded crazy on a lot of that call and it was so over the top that I still can't believe it even happened. of thatway because it was so patently ridiculous secretary raffensberger must have sensed the danger because he recorded that call, the call itself was widely publicized, but i'm glad the washington post got hold of it because it can show some sort of what happened and what What happened, what I remember basically beforehand was the president tweeting that Rensberger was a weak man who wasn't doing his job and wasn't telling the truth and he said, well, that's not the case sir, I guess it happened that the president He said he didn't have any answers to all these accusations that I had and that implied that he had the recording, yes, but we have answered many of those things so many times in public, over and over again in private. here's a letter here it is here's the stuff over and over again but he didn't fit the narrative he needed um so he was never going to listen I mean, there was never going to be enough evidence for him to listen On some level, I think he knows that he lost, but he would never admit that he lost and I think today you could go to a lie detector test and he became so convinced that it was stolen that he would pass the lie detector test.

Are you watching his speech? January 6, the president's speech where he says fight like hell um or have you seen it from my Pro. My problem now is that I don't remember if I saw it in real time or after the fact because we were all in the office because the Secretary is working on his letter to Congress with a 10-page letter explaining: Here's my response to all of these things before you have to go vote tonight on these things. I tell you not to question Georgia's vote. This is correct, so we were sitting there and there was some sort of smaller demonstration forming around our capital and I remember standing by the window and looking out, there was a guy in tactical gear with an AR-15.

I thought, huh, and there we were. I had some Georgia State Patrol security with us and basically maybe we should go somewhere else and I was like I was turning into Mr. Rambo oh they were going to kick me out and then they took like 30 seconds like that maybe it was better. Idea if we were going somewhere else and while we were in the car that's when it started breaking down and I started seeing it on Facebook it came up and the radio was playing it and I walked over to a TV and I was watching it. and I was kind of looking at him in disbelief.

I remember the first CU. I didn't have it in real time. The first image I saw was the kind of now iconic image of the interior of the Renda house of desks stacked against the door. security with guns pointed at the doors and windows that was the first image I saw of the Capitol Riot and that stuck in my memory of what was happening at the time and again I had worked on Capitol Hill I had friends who work on Capitol Hill um and it was incredible to me what was happening and it was a feeling of moral helplessness to see it happen.

I'm still angry about it to this day and I'll never stop being angry about what happened on That day, you say, you say incredible, but you had warned about the violence, you had seen how things were piling up, yeah, I mean, but still, the fact that there were people attacking police officers inside the nation's capital who had been standing for, you know, 10-odd years. 150 years like that since Civil War I. I mean, it's just that in itself there were thousands of people willing to do that at a time that was like the highest in increasing scale.

He could have seen potential in what he was seeing and it's just mob mentality what they mean. It starts going on and on and escalating and escalating and you take the individual out of it, they look, they say, would you do that? Of course, I wouldn't do that. That's crazy until they're involved and that's what we saw that day when you've come back, it seems like you didn't see it in real time when you went back and you saw the president's speech or you read about it and he's talking to that crowd and he says that the elections were stolen.

Different rules apply. and you have to fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore, what do you see in the president that morning before the attack? He was trying to stir the pot. He was trying to make something like that happen again. a Tip Drill chip I don't think it was a strategic plan. I don't think he said they're going to do this, then we'll do this and this and this is how we can get the election back, I think he said. let's throw him against the wall, let's see what happens and this is my last ditch effort, you know, maybe, if we can get past January 6th, you're in extra constitutional territory at that point, um and we have to go to court to find out what happened. and what to do.

I think it was a lunatic plan. I mean, it didn't make any sense, but does it make you angry because you know we saw your motion on December 1st? "Of course it made me angry, I mean, it was crazy, it was, let's break up, I'm an institutionalist, it's basically saying, let's tear down the institutions so I can recover, it wasn't about the country that was." He was using those, some of those languages, it was all about him, um, but to his followers, he has become their embodiment in many ways and again I try to be as empathetic and understanding as possible because there are tens of millions of people. hello good.

The people who look at him and listen to him and think he's their savior to some extent and look at what's happening now, like what's happening to my country, are so disconnected from him that playing with these Cleaves in society versus the things that Join Us has been part and parcel of politics for the last 15 or 20 years and this is a logical outcome. What really scares me is that he has played this rope to the end on the populist side of the right. This type of violence was very in your face, it came into the world at the time of social media and there was a singular individual that you could blame like Donald Trump, so again, if you read history books, it says that populism has these waves. and usually normal. the political system will begin to absorb parts of it, implement part of those policies and then let the steam out of the teapot and move on, in this case the heat has been kept on and the lid of the teapot has been kept Onwards no.

There has been very little or no vapor release and that makes me continue to worry. Going forward, there have been many efforts made to deal with what happened next and one of them was the January 6th committee where you testified, can you tell us? about that, about why you testified, were you hopeful about what the committee could do well? They subdued me, that was one of the reasons I testified, so listen, from my point of view, I was there as a fact witness. there to answer your questions honestly and explain what happened and make that part of the final record of what happened starting on January 6 in the 2020 election.

After that, I think the Republicans made a tactical mistake and didn't they worked with the committee and I think Pelosi made a tactical mistake by not letting the Republicans choose who she wanted to have on the committee, because again that broke what had happened before in Congress, so it became very one-sided, but now all the evidence they produced is real evidence. I have no doubt about it and you know the testimony that I saw was compelling from the police, from Ruby Freeman, from the secretary, from Rusty Bowers, from all these people who saw these things and then you saw.

The

interview

s with Bill Bar and his team were all necessary to get there. Now I think we have a much clearer record. The president knew very clearly that he lost and that everything he did outside of that was outside the general rules and the limits of the laws and going to court and everything else to try to do something to hold on and knowing that now is even more frustrating because without that in an organized way I don't think we would have as much information on that front. I think they probably did a pretty good job at the time, but there are always multiple angles to these stories and people pay the price for it, like if Liz Cheney lost.

I think almost every member who voted for impeachment lost every Republican member and the secretary of our state won and in fact Secretary Raffensberger won the largest margin of anyone who was re-elected in the state. He defeated a Republican backed by a Trump-backed congressman who outspent the secretary and still won the primary by more than 20 points than the American. Voters will support people who tell the truth and stay true to their convictions. I think some people who lost voted not so much for impeachment as others who are trying to play with the election deniers and trying to keep traditional Republicans at bay. they also end up pissing off both sides and losing the secretary never wavered is still a conservative republican told the truth followed the law still believes in conservative values ​​believes in voter ID I mean people ask why don't you change parties because I never go to change parties.

I think Democratic ideas are bad for America in the long run. I just do it, it's at the center of my being, but I'm not going to let the truth, the law and the Constitution win. because that's part of what that being is, so they did their job, I mean, it was a little one-sided, but that's because the Republicans basically handed it over to them and then I think the president secretary, I mean, Speaker Pelosi did a good job tactically. overcoming them and putting it the way she wanted to get there and what it was like to physically walk into the room, what it's like and what it's like to take the oath and tell your story, is it different? to tell the front line or 60 minutes, well, it's obviously the room they used.

I don't know the name now as it was built to surprise and amaze. It was a gigantic, huge room with high ceilings, you know it was meant for it. To do that, I had worked in Congress before, so I was never in that room, but I've been in a lot of the rooms and you're meant to bring the fear of the government down on you and I remember how strange. The minute you walk in you know you're wearing your best suit because you're going to appear on TV and you go to the table and there are literally like 200 cameras in your face all taking pictures of you and that's a little surreal and then we sit down. and I'm trying who who ask oh yeah what's his name who who shiff I remember they told me he was going to interrogate me and I was like damn it was like I can't stand that guy he irritates me to death because I think he's wrong and he doesn't tell the truth much, so I was very irritated by the whole process, but I said, you know, I'm going to act clearly.

I'm a witness to the facts, just answer the questions, you know, no. Don't try to be cute, don't try to play a game, just answer the questions honestly and then move on and get over it. That's my attitude about it and the importance of doing it under oath and for the record. I've said it many times before, but was it any different to do it before Congress? In that circumstance, it definitely felt different. I mean, there are 100 cameras filming you, it's a giant room, there are elected officials, all in front of you, that you've seen on television for the last 20 years, so yeah, it feels a little different than saying it in front of a camera or going to a press conference and outside you know you're 30 steps from your office so it felt different there's no doubt Secretary Raffensberger sitting there next to him and the Speaker of the House from Arizona and again I want to give some perspective from this.

I was the voting system implementation manager. He was a bureaucrat of all bureaucrats. Basically, at that point no one should know who the hell I am, so I'm sitting there next to an elected. official next to another elected official I didn't spend a lot of money to be there, I was just doing my job, so I was still on that surreal level, but somehow I came to terms with the point that I had done something that had basically been a moment for lack of a better word than that was going to be the reason I'm talking to you today.

If I hadn't lost my temper once after lunch on December 1, 2020, I wouldn't be talking to you today. So up to this point talking to you is surreal, it's just not, it's just weird.