Find the Votes: President Trump has claimed since election day that he’s the victim of voter fraud, but in the first solid evidence of attempted fraud, the perpetrator is the President himself.

  The Washington Post obtained a one-hour audio recording of Trump coaxing and cajoling the Georgia secretary of state to “find” the votes to reverse the President’s loss in that state.

   In the conversation Saturday afternoon with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his general counsel, Trump said, “The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

  Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was on the call along with Trump’s lawyers. The Post did not say who provided the recording.

  Trump rambled on about dead people voting, missing ballot boxes, and shredded ballots. He says, “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 no way I lost Georgia,” Trump repeatedly said. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

  At times Trump was delusional. He said, “I mean there’s turmoil in Georgia and other places. You’re not the only one I mean we have other states that I believe will be flipping to us very shortly.”

  He talked about 200,000 forged ballots.

  When told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI found no fraud, Trump said, “Then they’re incompetent. They’re either dishonest or incompetent, okay?”

 Trump threatened both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County were illegally destroyed to thwart investigators, an allegation supported by no evidence, they would be prosecuted.

  “That’s a criminal offense,” Trump said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”

  The first time he gets a chance to speak, Raffensperger tells Trump, “We don’t agree that you have won.”

Walk of Shame: Vice President Mike Pence has joined in spirit with 12 US Senators and as many as 140 members of Congress who plan to object to the Wednesday certification of Joe Biden as the president-elect.

  Pence, whose job it will be to preside over the formalities, said through a spokesman that he “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election.” 

  So far in 60 lawsuits, no one, not President Trump, Pence or a single Republican operative has produced evidence of a massive national election fraud. 

  In a walk of shame over the weekend, 11 US senators joined Missouri’s Josh Hawley announcing they plan to object, issuing a statement saying,  “The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.” 

  They cite “unprecedented allegations” but proof of none. The 11 senators whose names should go down in infamy are, Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Mike Braun of Indiana, and newly-elected Senators Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who were all sworn in just yesterday.

  Their joint statement said, “A fair and credible audit … would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President.”

  So, to put a point on it, Republicans have undermined public faith in the election by claiming fraud without proof and are demanding an investigation of what they can’t support. 

  Republican politicians afraid of Trump voters are getting on the President’s fraud train to preserve their popularity. Trump has claimed fraud in every kind of contest he’s lost from the television Emmy awards to the Iowa primary against Ted Cruz. He predicted that if he lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016 it would have been because the election was rigged.

  Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, one of few Republicans to openly stand up to the President, said in a statement, “Were Congress to actually reject state electors, partisans would inevitably demand the same any time their candidate had lost. Congress, not voters in the respective states, would choose our presidents.” 

  Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic that, “The problem with the Republican ‘establishment’ and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe.”

Viral News: The gravel-voiced Larry King, a fixture in American broadcasting, is being treated for Covid-19. The 87-year-old King has been a patient at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for more than a week. 

  This morning the US is well on its way to 21 million cases with 351,590 deaths.

The Obit Page: Floyd Little, a star running back for Syracuse and then a Hall of Famer with the Denver Broncos has died at age 78. He was only 5-11 and 195 pounds, small for a running back, but he had punch.

The Bulletin Board: California Rep. Nancy Pelosi was narrowly re-elected yesterday for another term as Speaker of the House. — More than 225 Google engineers have formed a union, a rarity in the tech world. — A British court has decline to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the US to face espionage charges.

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  We rarely include exterior links. But you should read the full transcript of Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state and listen to the audio here. It’s astounding.

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