The mainstream media and Georgia's secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, are utterly disgraceful, dishonest, and manipulative people.  Raffensperger released a private phone call that the media immediately claimed — falsely — showed Trump begging Raffensperger to fraudulently find enough votes for Trump to win.  In fact, Trump called Raffensperger to get him to stop obstructing the fraud investigation.  As Trump explained during the call, evidence proves Trump won Georgia by a massive margin, only to have victory stolen through equally massive fraud.  Trump sought to avoid litigation forcing Raffensperger to do his job, which is to make at least a minimal effort to clear away enough fraud to allow Trump his actual and honest victory in Georgia.

Here are just two examples of the media's dishonest claim that Trump was trying to force Raffensperger to commit fraud.  As you can see, their premise is that there is no evidence of fraud, so any action on Trump's part to claim victory is itself fraud.  Theirs is a deliberate example of circular logic, where their premise and conclusion are the same thing.

Washington Post: "The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking 'a big risk.'"

CNN: "In excerpts of the stunning one-hour phone call Saturday, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud."

Here's what really happened on the phone call.  First, Trump wasn't the only person on the phone.  Also present were Mark Meadows, Mike Pompeo, and multiple attorneys.  There isn't the slightest chance that they would have allowed Trump to beg Raffensperger for illegal votes or to threaten him.

Second, contrary to what the media implied, Trump was not operating off the premise that he lost Georgia.  If that had been the case, it would indeed have been wrong for Trump to beg for Raffensperger to "find" votes for him.

Instead, Trump was operating from the assertion that he won Georgia.  He opened the call with a strong recitation of the facts showing massive fraud on Raffensperger's watch.  According to Trump's evidence, he didn't lose by 11,780 votes; he won by well over 300,000 votes, including votes for Trump that disappeared and illegal votes for Biden.  Here are some of Trump's statements in that regard:

"I think it's pretty clear that we won.  We won very substantially in Georgia."

"We have ... anywhere from 250–300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls."

"We think that if you check the signatures — a real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County you'll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures. ..."

"[I]n the 50s of thousands ... that's people that went to vote and they were told they can't vote because they've already been voted for."

"It's 4,502 who voted but they weren't on the voter registration roll which they had to be. ..."

"You had 18,325 vacant address voters.  The address was vacant and they're not allowed to be counted."

Trump alluded to the faked water main break that allowed Fulton County election workers to count votes for hours after having sent observers home.  He noted that the video of that after-hours voting indicated that at "the minimum it was 18,000 ballots, all for Biden."

Trump pointed to 4,925 illegal out-of-state voters, 2,326 absentee ballots from vacant addresses, 5,000 dead people voting, and improperly handled drop boxes.  And he brought up the allegations that Georgia is shredding evidence as fast as it can.

The bottom line, as Trump accurately said, is that these infractions were "many, many times the 11,779 margin [sic] that they said we lost by."

Trump hammered over and over that he won the state.  No matter how you look at it, he said he won, and he's got the evidence to prove it.

At this point, Mark Meadows stated what Trump's team wanted — and it wasn't to fake votes for Trump.  It was, instead, an honest investigation: "What I'm hopeful for is there some way that we can ... find some kind of agreement to look at this a little bit more fully."  Thus, Meadows sought an agreement "that we can at least have a discussion to look at some of these allegations to find a path forward that's less litigious."

Raffensperger pushed back, saying he'd already had to deal with lawsuits (ignoring that the courts refused to hear evidence).  He also huffed that "we gave our state Senate about one and a half hours of our time going through the election issue by issue and then on the state House, the government affairs committee, we gave them about two and a half hours of our time, going back point by point on all the issues of contention.  And then just a few days ago we met with our U.S. congressmen, Republican congressmen, and we gave them about two hours of our time talking about this past election."

Did you get that?  The biggest election fraud claim in American history, the president on the phone, massive amounts of evidence, and Raffensperger whines that he's already given up six and a half hours of his time to the issue.

Trump again chimes in to say, "We won the state."  In response to Raffensperger's complaint that he sacrificed six and a half hours to the matter, Trump suggests that Raffensperger does not need to invest massive time in investigating all 300,000-plus problematic votes.  He just needs to investigate 11,779 to give Trump his rightful victory.  For, as Trump says, "Because, what's the difference between winning the election by two votes and winning it by half a million votes?  I think I probably did win it by half a million."

When Raffensberger pushes back again, saying his office disproved the cemetery vote contention, Cleta Mitchell, a Trump attorney, makes an important point: Georgia has been withholding records from the White House.

There's more in the conversation (much more, including a debate about the video allegedly showing Ruby Freeman repeatedly scanning the same ballots), but you get the gist.  Trump won.  A lazy, entitled, arrogant, and corrupt Raffensperger won't work with the White House to look for fraud (or prove the absence of fraud).  And the corrupt, dissolute, dishonest American media, unless brought to heel, will be the downfall of our constitutional republic.

Image: Donald Trump "I'm just in the way" meme.