Georgia governor rebuffs Trump’s call for special session to overturn election results, top official says

By Felicia Sonmez,

Georgia’s governor will not call a special session of the state’s legislature to overturn the election results in President Trump’s favor, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) said Sunday.

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Duncan said he “absolutely” believes that Gov. Brian Kemp (R) won’t accede to Trump’s demand that he persuade the state legislature to appoint electors who would override the popular vote and nullify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

“We’re certainly not going to move the goal posts at this point in the election,” Duncan said.

The lieutenant governor also weighed in on Trump’s Saturday night rally in the state. He said he was encouraged by the parts of the speech in which the president urged his supporters to vote for Sens. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) in Senate runoff elections next month that could decide which party controls the upper chamber.

But Duncan said Trump’s fanning of the flames around misinformation was “concerning,” pointing to the president’s repeated false claims that he won the election and that the election was “stolen.”

“The mountains of misinformation are not helping the process; they’re only hurting it,” Duncan said.

The lieutenant governor’s remarks came one day after Trump called Kemp to urge him to persuade the Georgia legislature to overturn Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures.

At his rally Saturday night in Valdosta, Ga., Trump briefly lashed out at Kemp for not embracing the allegations of fraud. “Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump said. He added: “So far we haven’t been able to find the people in Georgia willing to do the right thing.”

[Trump’s feud with Brian Kemp says it all about the president’s voter fraud claims]

Earlier last week, a top official in Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger’s office called on Trump to stop spreading false claims about fraud, saying the rhetoric was leading to threats of violence against election workers.

Duncan echoed that message Sunday, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that he, too, has been targeted by threats and that he and other officials have received increased security. Duncan said he was disgusted by the threats.

Duncan also noted that he, Kemp and Raffensperger (R) all voted for and campaigned for the president. Trump didn’t win the state, Duncan said, adding, “That doesn’t change our job description.”

In an interview Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week,” Raffensperger said that he has received death threats and that his wife has received “sexualized texts and things like that.”

“And now they’ve actually gone after people, been following … young poll workers and election workers in Gwinnett County and also our folks at one of our offices,” Raffensperger said. “And so, you’re seeing just irrational, angry behavior. It’s unpatriotic. People shouldn’t be doing that.”

Like Duncan, Raffensperger said that as a conservative Republican, he was disappointed with the election results but that there is no evidence of any fraud that “would overturn the will of the people here in Georgia.”

Asked about the possibility of a special session, Raffensperger said that the decision is not his to make but that such a move appeared unlikely.

“I don’t believe that there’s the will in the General Assembly for a special session. … That’s with the governor and the general assembly, and I’m sure they’ll have conversations,” he said. “But at the end of the day, what they’re really trying to say is if they did that, they would be then nullifying the will of the people.”

Amy Gardner contributed to this report.