Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Outed as Source of Fake Trump Quotes in Washington Post Story

Back in January, the Washington Post reported that Trump told an official working in Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office to “find the fraud” in the state, telling them that they would be a national hero if she did. The call took place on December 23rd, and was just released, proving that Trump never said that. In reality, Trump said that’d be praised when the “right answer comes out” and encouraged them to examine mail-in ballots in Fulton county.

The recording was discovered in a then-unnamed official’s computer trash bin after they said they didn’t think a recording existed. Without their gross incompetence in what appears to be them trying to cover their tracks, this bogus reporting would’ve never been exposed. Afterwards, the Washington Post published an epic correction to the story.

And despite all this, we still didn’t know who the source of the bogus quote was – until now.

As Arthur Bloom at The American Conservative reports:

The person who gave the erroneous quotes for the December 23 story has been identified by the Washington Post as Jordan Fuchs, Deputy Secretary of State of Georgia. She gave an interview to the Post‘s Erik Wemple on Tuesday, telling him “I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s [Frances Watson’s] interpretation of the call. The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary.”

She [Fuchs] continued “I think it’s pretty absurd for anybody to suggest that the president wasn’t urging the investigator to ‘find the fraud,’” Fuchs added, “These are quotes that [Watson] told me at the time.”

If she was truly concerned about illegal pressure being applied on the phone call, which Watson claims she did not feel, she could have gone to law enforcement and preserved the call record. Instead, she went to the Washington Post and the recording was put in the trash.

Fuchs’s involvement in the December 23 incident has led many to assume she was the source of the leaked recording from January 2 as well, also published by the Washington Post. Two sources told TAC that this was, in fact, the case. The only three people on Raffensperger’s side of the January 2 call were Raffensperger himself, general counsel Ryan Germany, and Fuchs. Fuchs also had an existing relationship with one of the Post reporters whose byline was on the story.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Becket Adams makes the great point that this is more than just an indictment of the Washington Post, it is indeed an indictment of the media. That’s not because they ran with a bogus story they failed to verify – but rather because they ran with a bogus story that they claimed to have verified.

• NBC News reported it “confirmed The Post’s characterization of the Dec. 23 call through a source familiar with the conversation.”
• USA Today claimed a “Georgia official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters confirmed the details of the call.”
• ABC News reported: “President Donald Trump phoned a chief investigator in Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office asking the official to ‘find the fraud’ and telling this person they would be a ‘national hero’ for it, an individual familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC News.”
• PBS NewsHour and CNN likewise appeared to claim they independently “confirmed” the story through their own anonymous sources.

And all of the media ran with it:

A poll found that trust in the media hit a new low in January – and it still isn’t low enough.

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