A newly released audio recording appears to show then-US President Donald Trump pressuring two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in Michigan not to sign certification documents for the 2020 presidential election, according to recordings reviewed by The Detroit News.
The call, from November 17, two weeks after the 2020 election, included Trump, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and the two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann.
Wayne County includes Detroit and most of the surrounding suburbs and is the most populous county in the state.
The canvassers had originally voted against certification, before agreeing to it on the condition that some precincts in Wayne County were audited at a later date. During the call, which reportedly happened 30 minutes after the meeting when Hartmann and Palmer agreed to sign the certification, Trump told them they would look “horrible” if they voted to approve the election results after first voting against them.
“We’ve got to fight for our country,” Trump said. “We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”
Later in the call, McDaniel told the canvassers “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it. [...] We will get you attorneys,” with Trump adding “We’ll take care of that.”
Palmer and Hartmann then left the meeting without signing the official statement of votes for Wayne County. The next day, they tried unsuccessfully to rescind their votes. Had they been successful, it could have thrown the election into chaos as the Michigan election would have been put into doubt. The recordings seem to implicate Trump as having direct involvement in efforts to overturn the election results in Michigan, a state Biden won by roughly 154,000 votes.
Previously, Trump came under fire for a phone call he had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in early January 2021, in which Trump said they “need only 11,000 votes” to win the state.
No one in the call has disputed the Detroit News’ summary of the call, Hartmann died in 2021.
Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told media outlets that Trump’s actions on the call “were taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election.”
A Republican-controlled state Senate committee investigated claims of voter fraud in the state but found no evidence of widespread fraud and Trump actually performed better in Wayne County in 2020 than he did in 2016.
In the days after the meeting, Palmer and Hartmann said their certification vote was the result of “intense bullying and coercion” and bad legal advice that they received after initially voting no.
While it was reported that Trump had called the two canvassers, the contents of the call were described as Trump expressing his gratitude. Palmer told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol in 2021 that she could not recall the exact words Trump used on the call or if he raised issues of the election.
But the call, according to the media outlet that heard it, Trump was focused on the 2020 election during the call, saying that Republicans have been “cheated” and that “everybody knows Detroit is crooked as hell.”
As he did in his Georgia call, Trump reportedly pushed the conspiracy that more votes were counted than had been counted, a discrepancy he attributes came from illegally cast absentee ballots. That claim has not been proven and multiple lawsuits focused on the 2020 election failed to make it to court, even when Trump-appointed judges were ruling on them.
In addition, Michigan’s election director, Jonathan Brater, said in an affidavit that the difference between absentee ballots tabulated and names in the poll was only 150 less than it should have been, not significantly larger, as Trump claimed.
“If ballots had been illegally counted, there would be substantially more, not slightly fewer, ballots tabulated than names in the poll books,” Brater said.
Trump is facing a case in Georgia for alleged election interference, with his conversation with Raffensperger playing a part in that indictment.