Extraordinary new evidence of a desperate President Donald Trump caught on tape trying to steal the election reveals the depth of his corruption and makes his Republican Capitol Hill allies complicit in his bid to thwart the will of voters.
In a fresh abuse of power, Trump tried to oppress top Georgia GOP officials into finding votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win in the state. The staggering telephone call, audio of which was obtained by CNN and first reported by the Washington Post, amounted to the most severe threat yet posed by his authoritarian instincts to American democracy.
Even before the latest fury, this week already marked a watershed moment for Biden's coming presidency, a ruptured Republican Party, and for the integrity of the US political system.
For example, a GOP attempt to block Congress' certification of Biden's win based on lies and false conspiracy theories about fraud on Wednesday has no chance of succeeding. Still, it will further convince millions of Trump voters the election was rigged. Scores of GOP lawmakers plan to choose the vanquished President and his voters over the cherished principles of free elections in fracturing that will have lasting consequences for the GOP and the nation.
On Tuesday, two Georgia runoff elections will decide whether Republicans will hold their Senate majority and retain the power to block Biden's sweeping plan and hopes of swiftly confirming a Cabinet at a time of national crisis.
All of this is coming to a head as Trump incites protests in Washington in a bid to disrupt the election certification effort, amid fears of violence, while ignoring a worse-than-ever pandemic and the consequent deaths of 350,000 Americans.
The President blasted the world-leading US death toll as "fake news" on Sunday while disregarding growing evidence his White House has botched the rollout of necessary new vaccines just as it did earlier stages of the pandemic.
But Surgeon General Jerome Adams contradicted Trump's false claim on CNN's "State of the Union," telling Jake Tapper: "From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those numbers."
The release of the stunning telephone conversation between Trump and Georgia's GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger escalated the constitutional crisis Trump started stoking even before his election loss.
"So look. All I want to do is this. I want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state," Trump said, in a comment that at best was an abuse of power, and that could raise legal questions. Throughout the hour-long call, the President repeatedly prods Raffensperger to agree to his false claims that thousands of votes were illegally cast, that some ballots were destroyed, or came from dead people or out-of-state voters. The Georgia secretary of state tells the President that he has false information.
A string of recount audits and legal cases have affirmed Biden's narrow victory in Georgia in November in one of the clutches of swing states he won on the way to 306 electoral votes and a clear win over the President.
The tape recalled the kind of coercive, corrupt behavior that led to Trump's impeachment over a call with Ukraine's President, but that all Republican senators except Mitt Romney decided last year did not merit his ouster from office.
In the latest smoking gun call, Trump is heard trying to convince Raffensperger to announce that he had recalculated the vote totals. The President won and threatened criminal reprisals if his fellow Republicans failed to act.
"At the very least, it's an abuse of presidential power which is a normal time would be impeachable," said CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali.
In the Watergate scandal, John Dean, a former White House legal counsel, told CNN's Fredricka Whitfield Trump was at "the edges of extortion."
Biden's senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said in a statement that the tape offered "irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his party to get him to rescind a state's lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place."
"It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump's assault on American democracy."