Legal Experts Say Trump Broke Law by Pressuring Georgia's Republican Secretary of State to 'Recalculate', 'Find' Votes - FarsNews Agency

(FNA)- Legal experts announced President Donald Trump broke Georgia law when he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to 'find' enough votes to overturn Joe Biden's election victory in the state in a leaked phone call.

Audio of the hour-long Saturday phone call was published Sunday by The Washington Post, capturing Trump berating Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp to do anything they could to change the outcome of the Georgia election.  

He told the Republican officials, "So look. All I want to do is this – I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated."

Several legal experts have come forward to argue that Trump's plea constituted a violation of Georgia's law for criminal solicitation of election fraud.

"The president asked, in no uncertain terms, the secretary of state to invent votes, to create votes that were not there," Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, told POLITICO.

"Not only did he ask for that in terms of just overturning the specific margin that Joe Biden won by, but then said we needed one additional vote to secure victory in Georgia," he added.

The Post did not reveal its source for the audio, but experts noted that under Georgia law only one party in a conversation needs to consent to a recording, meaning that whoever turned on their microphone would not be legally liable.

The recording sparked uproar among Democrats, including calls for impeachment or for Trump to resign. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris called it "the voice of desperation" and a "bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the president".

Some political commentators compared the call to the Watergate tapes that led to the fall of past US President Richard Nixon.