Two Months Later, WAPO Corrects Story Misquoting Trump About December Phone Call With Georgia Investigator

The Washington Post has issued a lengthy correction after published audio found in the investigator’s trash folder revealed it misquoted former President Donald Trump regarding his phone call with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

In a subsequent story written by the publication, they attempt to still imply that former President Trump was in the wrong, while acknowledging that they misquoted him at first.

From the Washington Post:

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

Trump supporter Tim Young tweeted a screenshot of the correction and asked rhetorically, “Oh… so Trump was right again?”

<center><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Oh... so Trump was right again? <a href="https://t.co/je8DsgJkER">pic.twitter.com/je8DsgJkER</a></p>&mdash; Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) <a href="https://twitter.com/TimRunsHisMouth/status/1371514820604878851?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></center>

Other liberal outlets have implied that the phone call was still problematic as well, however. The Daily Beast said that on the call, Trump urged Watson to focus her investigations on Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, where more than 50 percent of residents are Black, they noted.

“If you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable,” he said, while criticizing him for providing no evidence.

Fox 5 Atlanta ran a story with the headline, “Trump called Georgia Secretary of State investigator, urged her to find fraudulent votes.”

They quoted Jessica Cino, who is a criminal justice law professor at Georgia State and said the phone calls by Trump to the Secretary of State and his chief investigator show a long timeline in which the then-president was attempting to undermine the election process.

Cino told them that she believes “It does seem to clearly violate the state law and the federal law in terms of trying to tamper, influence, or otherwise do something to change the votes in an election.”