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- Top Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling said Rudy Giuliani “lied” by presenting a deceptively edited video as evidence of election fraud.
- In a “60 Minutes” interview, Sterling debunked Giuliani’s claim about illegitimate ballots, saying the president’s lawyer showed only a misleading clip to Georgia state senators despite having access to the full video.
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who also appeared on “60 Minutes,” said Giuliani “knows that what he said was not true.”
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A top Georgia election official said Rudy Giuliani “lied” over election fraud claims by presenting a deceptively edited video as evidence, despite having access to the full footage.
Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state, made the comments in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, during which he described President Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud as “fantastical, unreasonable,” and “lacking in any factual reality.”
Sterling, a Republican and Trump voter, told interviewer Scott Pelley that Giuliani presented a selectively edited video to Georgia state senators as evidence. In a clip shown on “60 Minutes” of Giulani presenting the video, he calls it a “powerful smoking gun.”
Giuliani’s video, which also aired in national Trump campaign ads, claims to show cases of ballots removed from under a table and “added in secret.”
However, Sterling said the full video shows a different story.
—60 Minutes (@60Minutes) January 11, 2021
He said when election officials were told they were done counting for the day, uncounted ballots were placed in secure, tamper-proof cases and stored under the table. Shortly after, the officials were told they needed to continue counting through the night.
At that point, the secure cases of uncounted ballots were retrieved from under the table to proceed the counting.
Sterling said the president's team always had access to the complete video, but Giuliani only presented the state senators with the part that shows cases being pulled out from under the table.
"Rudy Giuliani looked them in the eye and lied," he said.
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"From my point of view, they intentionally misled the state senators, the people of Georgia, and the people of the United States about this, to cause this conspiracy theory to keep going and keep the disinformation going, which has caused this environment that we're seeing today," Sterling said.
Giulani did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
Trump and his allies have repeated unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter and election fraud since the president lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden. However, none of the claims have held up in court and the Justice Department said it found no evidence of widespread fraud.
The belief by some of the president's supporters that the election was fraudulent fueled the the deadly siege on the US Capitol last week, where many of the rioters chanted and held up signs that read "Stop the steal!"
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, also a Republican, appeared on "60 Minutes" as well, echoing Sterling's claims and saying Giuliani "knows that what he said was not true."
"But our state senate did not ask us to come in there so that we could rebut what they said," he said of the Republican legislature. "And it was actually left as the gospel truth, and it wasn't. It was fabricated."
Earlier this month, in a leaked phone call between Raffensperger and the White House, Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims about the election and urged the secretary of state to "find" him enough votes to beat Biden.
The day after the call was leaked, Sterling also debunked the president's claims, which he said made him "scream" because they were so dishonest.