During his fruitless effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Donald Trump told the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator in a late December phone call that “something bad happened,” and that “when the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which obtained a recording of the call. “I can assure you that our team and the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation], that we are only interested in the truth and finding the information that is based on the facts,” the investigator, Frances Watson, replied. Watson was conducting an audit at the time of voting results in Cobb County, but Trump urged her to focus on Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, where more than 50 percent of residents are Black. “If you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable,” Trump said, while offering no evidence or explanation for the provably false claim.

Trump told Watson that his loss in the state “never made sense, and, you know, they dropped ballots. They dropped all these ballots. Stacey Abrams, really, really terrible.” As former federal prosecutor Nick Akerman previously told The Washington Post, which first reported on the existence of the call, “Oh my God, of course that’s obstruction—any way you cut it.”