It’s been a little more than three years since Donald Trump was caught on tape demanding that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find” him 11,780 votes–one more than was needed to flip Georgia’s electoral votes–and then threatening the state’s top official with criminal prosecution if he refused.
The tape turned out to be the single most powerful evidence of Trump’s relentless pressure on state and local election officials to alter vote totals. It would later feature prominently in Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference indictment against Trump as well as embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ racketeering conspiracy case against the ex-president and 18 of his alleged co-conspirators.
But the intriguing back story of how the tape came into existence until now has remained concealed from public view. Although the issue was avoided—deliberately—by the January 6th committee and goes unmentioned in the criminal indictments of Trump, the taping of the sitting president without his knowledge was the improbable, last-minute, and unilateral decision of Jordan Fuchs, a savvy, 30-year-old Republican operative and Raffensperger’s top aide, who was convinced—for good reason—that the president would distort the contents of what took place in his phone call with her boss.
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Fuchs, also for good reasons, has consistently declined to discuss publicly her role in creating “the smoking gun” Trump tape. At the time, she was visiting her grandparents in Florida—one of a minority of states that require two-party consent in the taping of phone calls. While it is highly unlikely Fuchs would ever be charged for doing so, her friends and colleagues remain in awe of her temerity in taping the president—something a couple of them confessed they would never have had the cojones to do themselves. Regardless of how the cases against Trump shake out, it remains arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle over the 2020 presidential results.
A cheery young woman with shaggy blond locks, Fuchs has a pleasant demeanor that masks the sharp instincts of a battle-tested political consultant. While serving as a vice president of the firm of Mark Rountree, a veteran Georgia GOP campaign strategist, Fuchs managed Raffensperger’s winning campaign for Secretary of State in 2018. After the election, she left Rountree in a dispute over how to divvy up the lucrative revenue for TV campaign ads and, at the tender age of 28, was appointed deputy secretary and chief of staff for Raffensperger. It was a heady position for Fuchs and one that made her fiercely loyal and protective of the boss.
That loyalty was sorely tested in the tense, chaotic days after the 2020 election. On Nov. 6, Raffensperger and his chief of operations, Gabriel Sterling (a close friend of Fuchs and a former colleague at Rountree’s firm) held a press conference to announce that while the counting in Georgia was continuing, Biden had a growing lead and there were no signs of “widespread irregularities.”
The White House was furious. Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle flew down to Atlanta to demand that the state’s Republican Party officials get behind a full-throated challenge to Georgia’s election results or his father would “tank” the state’s two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, in an upcoming run-off against Democratic challengers. Trump Jr.’s brazen demands spooked the state’s GOP hierarchy. “There was an overriding concern that we did not want Donald Trump to think we dropped the ball—yes, we were all concerned about keeping him happy,” said David Shafer, then the Georgia Republican Party chairman, who has since been indicted in the Fulton County case as one of Trump’s co-defendants. “We didn’t want him getting mad at Georgia Republicans when we were trying to hold things together for the run-off.” Living in mortal fear of the president’s wrath, Perdue and Loeffler fell in line. On November 9, 2020, they accused Raffensperger of “mismanagement” of the election and called on him to resign “immediately.”
The demand triggered a crisis within the Secretary of State’s office, resulting in a flood of lawsuits by Trump and his allies and sickening threats against Raffensperger and his wife. “The Raffenspergers should be put on trial for treason and face execution,” read a text message to Tricia Raffensperger’s cell phone at 10:31 p.m. that same night as Perdue and Loeffler released their statement. “Suck a dick, bitch.” read another at 12:08 a.m. The Proud Boys showed up at the couple’s home and MAGA warriors harassed their daughter-in-law and broke into her house.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows meets with Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs on Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2020, at the Cobb County Civic Center, where investigators were conducting an audit of voter signatures on absentee ballot envelopes.
Mark Niesse/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via APFor the next two months, Fuchs saw it as her job to stand up against the assault from the president’s supporters and defend the integrity of the office’s handling of the election results. And that’s precisely what she did on the morning of December 22, 2020, when White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows—accompanied by a bevy of Secret Service agents—showed up unexpectedly at the Cobb County Civic Center outside Atlanta to observe an audit ordered by Raffensperger into how election workers had checked the signatures of mail-in ballots to verify they matched those when the voter first registered. It was that surprise visit by Meadows that set in motion the chain of events that led to the taping of the Trump-Raffensperger phone call.
Tipped off to the visit shortly before his arrival, Fuchs rushed to the scene and got there just in time for an uneasy confrontation with Meadows. As she saw it, the very idea that a White House chief of staff would fly down to Georgia to look over the shoulders of election workers trying to do their job smacked of intimidation. As soon as she arrived, Fuchs positioned herself in the doorway to the audit room blocking Meadows, more than twice her age and towering over her, from entering. “My singular purpose was to make sure he’s not inside the room,” Fuchs said.
Meadows protested he hadn’t come to disrupt anything. “I’m not making any allegations as much as I am trying to get to the truth,” Meadows said. He just wanted to watch how the audit was being conducted, he explained. On the spot, the resourceful Fuchs invented a new policy for Secretary of State supervised post-election audits. Because there was an official investigation underway, only law enforcement was permitted to enter the room, she told him. No outsiders, even from the White House. In this, she got a helpful boost. Vic Reynolds, the longtime chief of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, was there—and somewhat more softly backed Fuchs up on Meadows not coming in. Maybe it was better if you wait outside, he told him. Meadows was not happy. “Mark kept trying to edge his way in,” Fuchs recalled.
When that didn’t work, he managed to give the auditors an anodyne pep talk from the doorway, telling them they were serving the cause of American democracy. Fuchs didn’t buy it. “His real purpose was to talk to the investigators and persuade them there was fraud.”
What possessed Fuchs to confront the White House chief of staff? She, like Raffensperger and Sterling, had been through the wringer for the past seven weeks, subjected to unrelenting attacks and whispering campaigns, accused of being corrupt RINOS and traitors to their party, much of it coming from longtime friends and political allies. Fuchs too had threats directed towards her and had taken her own targeted incoming, most notably when the celebrated trial lawyer L. Lin Wood, firing shots left and right from his Tomotley, South Carolina plantation, accused her of being the behind-the-scenes manipulator of Raffensperger… and of having been a “witch.”
Woods, who had been recruited by Trump Jr. to be a public face of the president’s legal challenges in Georgia, had picked up on an unpleasant episode from Fuchs’ past. For a brief period as a teenager, Fuchs had dabbled in the occult, immersed in the cosmology of witches and warlocks, an interest that grew out of her reading of the Harry Potter books. Her parents, evangelical Christians, pushed her to go public as part of an organized campaign to ban the phenomenally popular books due to their purported satanic influences over the minds of young children. As a 15-year-old girl, Fuchs testified before a Gwinnett County school board hearing in suburban Atlanta how the Harry Potter books made witchcraft seem “mystical, exciting, and innocent,” causing her and her friends to cast spells and perform a seance in gym class. Her testimony got statewide media attention and was later highlighted in a report from a far-right Christian group that quoted a Vatican exorcist as saying, “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of darkness, the devil.” (The school board turned down banning the books after its lawyer pointed out that if it were to remove all books and stories that discussed witchcraft, it would have to ban Macbeth and Cinderella.)
Fuchs had long since outgrown her interest in witchcraft. She graduated from high school, attended the University of Georgia, and joined College Republicans. She later landed a Council of Foreign Relations fellowship in Washington and worked on Capitol Hill for a Republican congressman before moving back to Georgia to pursue her fledgling career as a GOP consultant. But in the overheated post-election atmosphere, Wood went after Fuchs and sought to portray her as Raffensperger’s devil-worshiping Svengali.
“Do you believe @JordyFuchs age 30 with 1 year of government experience should have negotiated Dominion deal & thereafter essentially run GA Sec. of State Office?” he tweeted on December 16. “Something ain’t right in GA.” And then he added: “Jordan Fuchs @JordyFuchs has admitted publicly on Facebook that she was at one time a practicing witch. Yes, a Wicken. I do not respect that belief.”
As upsetting as it was for Fuchs to have this incident from her past dredged up, she now had well-honed instincts for smacking back. “Little man ego will always have issues with female leadership. Just ask @LLinWood former law partners… and ex wife,” she wrote on Twitter. And then, in another tweet tagging Wood: “Have you ever met a man with a tiny man ego? How do you manage little man syndrome? Asking for a friend.”
It was part of the ethos of her trade—let no charge go unanswered, and make sure you get the last word. Fuchs by then viewed herself in the middle of a political war for which there was only one acceptable outcome. Her mindset was best explained in a revealing interview she gave some time later with a University of Georgia student who questioned her over Zoom about her advice for young women who wanted to make it in the world of politics. What makes it worth it for you? the student asked her. Fuchs didn’t reference the post-election battle with Trump world, but she might as well have.
“It’s the win,” she replied. “Once you win, and once you get a client into office, the win clears all memory of anything horrible that happened in a campaign—working late, long hours, the attack ads you have to deal with, the whisper campaigns—all of that goes away with the win. And that’s what really keeps me going in all this.”
In the battle over the 2020 election, Fuchs was determined to stand up to Donald Trump’s pressure—and to win.
Even so, Fuchs still might not have gone to the lengths of taping the president had it not been for what happened next. While at the Cobb County center, Meadows had exchanged pleasantries and posed for a photo with Frances Watson, who served as chief investigator for Raffensperger’s office and was overseeing the Cobb County audit. Then Meadows got her cell phone contacts. Fuchs, watching all this, didn’t like it. If they were all in Washington for an official White House visit, sure—have your photo taken with the chief of staff. But not under these circumstances. There was ongoing litigation. Watson was a senior employee of the office that Trump’s campaign was suing. Watson was overseeing an official state audit in which Trump’s White House had a singular interest. “I thought it was inappropriate,” Fuchs said about Meadows’ entreaties to Watson.
The next evening, around 9:30 p.m., Watson was at home in bed when her phone rang. It was the White House switchboard asking her to hold. The president wanted to talk to her. Instinctively, Watson, an ex-cop, taped the call.
“Hello, Frances. How are you?” Trump said in a casual, friendly tone as though there was nothing unusual about the fact that he was calling her.
“Hello, Mr. President, I am actually doing very well,” Watson replied, seeming to suppress laughter at the very idea she was having this conversation.
Trump continued with the sweet talk. “Well, you have a big fan in our great chief, our chief of staff, Mark. I just wanted to thank you for everything. He told me you’ve been great.
“And you know”—getting to the point—“look, this country is counting on it,” said Trump, apparently referring to the Cobb County audit.
“So I won Florida in a record number, Ohio in a record. Texas in a record, Alabama by 40, 40 points. And I won everything but Georgia and, you know I won Georgia by a lot and the people know it. And you know something happened. I mean, something bad happened.”
Trump brought up Fulton County, which he was now fixated on thanks to his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s wild (and utterly false) claims to the Georgia legislature that two African American election workers in Fulton, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, had pulled out a “suitcase” of fake Biden ballots and stuffed them through the counting machines on election night. “If you can get to Fulton, you’re going to find things that are gonna be unbelievable, the dishonesty that we’ve heard from them… But Fulton, Fulton is the mother lode, as the expression goes… The people of Georgia are so angry at what happened to me. They know I won, won by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”
The call didn’t last long, a little more than six minutes in its entirety. There were no overt threats, only talk of the kudos that would come her way if she did what the president wanted. “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised… Anyway, but whatever you can do, Frances,” said Trump. Watson was clearly uncomfortable just listening to the president telling her how to do her job. As she later told a colleague, “I just wanted to get off that phone as soon as possible.”
That night, after she got off, Watson called Fuchs and told her about her conversation with the president. The next day, based on Watson’s account but before she’d had a chance to listen to the tape, Fuchs recounted the call to Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner. The Post account was a big story; the president had called a Georgia state investigator to influence the outcome of an official state audit. But the story overstated what Trump actually said. It said Trump told Watson to “find the fraud” and she would be a “national hero” if she did. He didn’t actually use those words. The actual ones—and the mere fact of the phone call in the first place—were damning enough. Still, The Post had to run a correction.
The incident reinforced an important lesson. The tape, with the actual words, counts.
As for the whole country counting on the results of the audit, it didn’t have to wait long. Six days later, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced that it had reviewed the entire sample of 15,118 ballots in Cobb County and found “no fraudulent absentee ballots.”
It was, as Raffensperger later noted, “the third strike against voter fraud claims in Georgia.” It was not the end, however, of the White House’s efforts to prod Watson to find the supposed “dishonesty” in heavily African American Fulton County that so consumed the president. On December 27, Meadows texted Fuchs with an extraordinary proposal: What if the Trump campaign paid her to do so? “Is there a way to speed up Fulton county signature verification in order to have results before Jan 6 if the Trump campaign assists financially,” he wrote her.
Fuchs never responded.
Trump’s fixation on Georgia reached its apex on Jan. 2, 2021. The situation at this point was looking increasingly desperate for Trump world. The Electoral College vote was locked in. The president’s lawsuits were going nowhere. Not a single legislative leader in any state had signaled a willingness to call a special session. The clock was ticking towards January 6 when Trump was planning a Stop the Steal rally outside the White House in hopes a giant public outpouring would bolster his last implausible move: getting Vice President Pence to unilaterally reject certifying Biden electors in the contested battleground states once friendly Republican members of Congress objected.
But in order for the strategy to have a prayer of success, he and his lawyers needed a win—somewhere. Once again, they looked south to Georgia where the final certified tally by Raffensperger had him behind by 11,779 votes.
For weeks, the White House had been trying to get through to Raffensperger. “Mr. Secretary, Mark Meadows here. If you could give me a brief call at your convenience,” the White House chief of staff texted him on November 19. And again on December 5: “Mr Secretary: Can you call the White House switchboard...Your voicemail is full.” All told, the January 6th committee counted 18 attempts by Trump and the White House to get through to the Georgia Secretary of State in the weeks after the election. (Meadows, for his part, would only acknowledge initiating three such attempts.) But Raffensperger studiously ignored each and every one of them. He was being sued by the Trump campaign and well knew that anything he said could and likely would be used against him.
Finally, though, he relented. On the morning of January 2, Raffensperger did a Fox News interview during which host Neil Cavuto pressed him on the election results. Raffensperger went through the numbers in Georgia: 20,000 traditional Republican voters who had voted in the June GOP primary never showed up on election day in November. Senator Perdue got 19,000 more votes in the metro regions of Atlanta and Athens (home of the University of Georgia) than Trump did. And overall, GOP congressional candidates got 33,000 more votes than Trump.
In short, the evidence was clear. A not insignificant number of Republican voters in Georgia—enough to make the difference—had turned away from Trump, casting ballots for GOP down-ballot candidates, but choosing Biden (or a third party or no candidate at all) for president. His numbers also pointed to the fundamental illogic of the “stop the steal” fanatics: Why would the Venezuelans or the “corrupt” Democrats or whoever was fraudulently stuffing or flipping ballots for Biden have only done so in the presidential race—and ignore critically important races that could have altered the balance of power in Congress?
Among those watching Raffensperger that morning was Trump. Not long after the interview, Fuchs got a call from a staffer. Trump through the White House switchboard had called the Secretary of State office’s media line. He was looking for Raffensperger. Then Fuchs, who was in Orlando to visit her grandparents, got a call from Meadows who reiterated: The president wanted to talk to the Secretary.
Fuchs raced through the possibilities in her mind. This was now a direct appeal from the White House on behalf of the president, hard to blow off. But there were also pitfalls and huge risks. Fuchs made clear to Meadows there would be conditions on any phone call. This would not be a “one on one;” that was against office policy. Raffensperger’s general counsel, Ryan Germany, had to be on the call as well as senior staff. Meadows balked at one name Fuchs mentioned, Raffensberger’s chief of operations, Gabe Sterling. Fuchs really wanted him on. Privately, she called him her “pit bull.” She knew he would not hesitate to push back on any falsehood uttered by Trump. But it was clear the White House wanted nothing to do with him—not since Sterling’s impassioned warning in a news conference weeks earlier that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about the election might end up getting somebody killed.
“Mr. Sterling does not need to be on that call,” Meadows said sternly.
Sterling was her friend, but Fuchs consented.
Fuchs then notified Raffensperger, who was at first reluctant. But he agreed so long as Germany and Fuchs were also on the call. It was set up for 3 p.m.
Raffensperger drove home to Johns Creek where he and his wife Tricia parked themselves in their kitchen to await the call. Germany was at home about to take his daughter on a bike ride when he was notified about the impending call. He quickly switched gears, went upstairs, put his cell phone on speaker and took out a miniature putting rug he had just gotten for Christmas to practice his putts while he waited for the president to lay out his case.
Arranging all this from her grandparents’ home in Orlando, Fuchs, more than anybody, was keenly aware of the dangers Raffensperger faced in talking to Trump, with his well-documented habit of reinventing whatever it is that had just occurred if it would accrue to his political benefit. In the moment, Fuchs decided she would protect the boss. When the White House switchboard patched the president through, Fuchs put herself on mute. And then, without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped the call.
The contents of the call have long since been memorialized in the January 6 committee’s report and the Smith and Willis indictments of Trump. For the next 62 minutes, Trump threw out a blizzard of false claims and phony statistics as he cajoled, badgered, berated, and threatened Raffensperger to “recalculate” the Georgia vote totals to put him on top. When Raffensperger refused to budge, Trump, as is his wont, tried ridicule.
“They’re going around playing you and laughing at you behind your back, Brad, whether you know it or not. They’re laughing at you.”
And then, a not so veiled threat: Given all the evidence of “corrupt” ballots, Trump told Raffensperger he could be in criminal jeopardy himself.
“It is more illegal for you than it is for them, because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. “
Trump once again talked about the “shredding” of ballots “based on what I’ve heard” and made things even clearer: “You know, I mean, I’m notifying you that you’re letting it happen.” He noted that Raffensperger had said his office had found no criminality in the voting during his Fox News interview that morning. That was “very dangerous stuff,” Trump said. “When you talk about no criminality, I think it’s very dangerous for you to say that.”
Trump, getting increasingly frustrated, finally cut to the chase: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”
The recalculation that Trump was looking for turned out to be quite specific: just one more vote than was needed to put him over the top.
And then: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
It may have been the most revealing line of all. It was as though Trump viewed the whole exercise as some sort of real estate negotiation. This was the world he knew best: Just cut him a small “break”—throw in a mere 11,000 votes—then they could all shake hands and move on. The art of the deal.
As the call approached the one-hour mark, Fuchs was thinking, Is this going to last forever? How do I get these guys off? She took it upon herself to shut it down.
“Need to end this call,” she texted Meadows.
And then another one: “I don’t think this will be productive much longer.”
Meadows responded: “Ok.” And then Fuchs: “Let’s save the relationship.”
The next morning, Trump was the first to disclose the phone call. “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and vote fraud in Georgia,” he tweeted. “He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destructions, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”
Raffensperger decided to respond, also on Twitter: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not truth. The truth will come out.”
It didn’t take long. Later that day, the tape of the phone call popped up in the inbox of Amy Gardner at the Washington Post. The story broke, with a link to the tape, at 9:59 p.m.
From today’s perspective, the disclosure of the tape—with Trump’s brazen pestering of Raffensperger to commit what would have amounted to electoral fraud—was critical to building the cases against the ex-president. But it led to a private ordeal for Fuchs. She learned after the fact about Florida’s two-party consent requirement for the taping of calls. When the January 6 committee reached out for her testimony, a lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness. The committee’s lawyers agreed, assuming the request was due to her potential legal exposure in Florida. But when she was called before a special Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony. But even were a Florida prosecutor to choose to try to bring a case—as a first offense, it would be only a misdemeanor charge—Fuchs would have an effective defense: Florida law grants an exemption for law enforcement purposes. As administrator and enforcer of Georgia election laws, the Secretary of State’s office is a law enforcement agency.
And by taping the president’s crude, heavy-handed attempt to pressure Georgia’s top election official, Fuchs did more than anyone else to hand-deliver what law enforcement—in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta—needed to prosecute the president.
Excerpted from FIND ME THE VOTES: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election ©2024 Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, and reprinted by permission from Twelve Books/Hachette Book Group.
