Trump phone call: Democrats ask FBI for ‘immediate criminal investigation’ in new letter

A pair of House Democrats has asked FBI Director Christopher Wray to open a criminal probe into Donald Trump regarding his phone call over the weekend with the Georgia official in charge of running the state’s elections.

“As Members of Congress and former prosecutors, we believe Donald Trump engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of election crimes. We ask you to open an immediate criminal investigation into the President,” Congressman Ted Lieu of California and Congresswoman Kathleen Rice of New York wrote to Mr Wray on Monday.

In an hour-long conversation on Saturday, an audio tape of which was obtained and published by the Washington Post on Sunday, the outgoing president asked Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him find votes to overturn his loss there to President-elect Joe Biden.

“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,” Mr Trump said.

He insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”