Gabriel Sterling is an elections official in Georgia. He served as the state’s voting system implementation manager from 2019 to 2020 and is currently the chief operating officer for the secretary of state. He testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The following interview was conducted by Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on Oct. 17, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Let’s start on Election Day 2020 with where you are. Did you vote in person that day? Who did you vote for?

I voted early in person for the 2020 election because on Election Day, I’m with the secretary of state and our whole team in the war room kind of making sure everything runs properly, especially for 2020, because it was the first time we had used our brand-new paper ballot system, because in Georgia, before 2020, we hadn’t had actual paper ballots in 20 years, so it was kind of a big deal.

And so I did it, I don’t know, a week and a half beforehand, and it was easy. I did vote for President [Donald] Trump and whoever else was on the ballot with an “R” next to their name probably. I’m a Republican, so that’s what I did. …

… And how did it seem like from the inside things were going that day? Obviously I imagine there’s always problems and things that need to be fixed.

No, that was the thing: There was no problem. There was literally no problems. We were using some tools. We could see how long lines were. And literally, I think on that day, the only issue that we really had was later in the day that there was a car accident way down in south Georgia, near Waycross in Ware County. And the thing is, if you know that area, that’s where the Okefenokee is. So when you have roads and there’s a car accident on like a main road, to get to this one polling location, they had to go 45 minutes out of their way. But literally, outside of that, everything worked.

In fact, when everything finished, we were essentially in victory mode. We were doing a victory lap because everything was so smooth. Everything had gone so well. We had already started tabulating absentee ballots, and so we were in a pretty good place. We were very happy with what had gone on that day. The counties had gotten their work done. We didn’t really have any actual issues on Election Day, so we were pretty happy. That was the mood.

Now, at the end of the day, there was one issue that came up, that Fulton County, … we were told that they were going to stop counting ballots. And we’re like, “Why in the heck would they do that?” So the secretary said to the television cameras that were assembled, “Some of us are going to work the rest of the night to get this stuff done; we think other counties should as well.”

And our elections director for the state called the elections director of Fulton County and said, “Why are you closing down?” He goes, “What do you mean closing down?” Because they were in two different places. The elections director was in one warehouse, and then at English Street, where they were processing Election Day votes, and then at State Farm Arena, where his deputy [was] processing absentee votes, and he had decided at 10:00, “We’re going to shut it down.” And then his boss Rick [Richard Barron] called him, Ralph Jones, and said, “You need to stay longer.”

And you can see this on some of the later, the security tapes we all saw, where this guy takes the phone call. You can literally see his shoulders kind of slump. He’s like, “Oh, all these people have been here since 7:00 in the morning. I’ve got to go tell them to work longer.” So he goes over there. And this fell into the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished, because we were just trying to get them to get their work done, and then, because of those actions, it turned into one of the bigger conspiracy theories that seems to never want to die.

But this was something you knew about at the time?

Yeah, we were literally talking to the press about it. It was like there was nothing hidden about this. It was all very public.

So let me ask you about yourself. What was your job at this point?

At this point, I was still—the title was voting system implementation manager. We had a lottery to come up with the most bureaucratic-sounding name for my role, and that won. So I was sitting there trying to make sure everything functioned properly, working with our elections teams, working with the counties. And again, we pulled it off because this was, with the new voting machines, it was the fastest, largest rollout of a new voting system in American history, and we wanted to make sure it ran properly in the biggest election in the middle of a pandemic with record turnout. So we were able to accomplish all those goals.

And you mentioned that you voted for President Trump, and anyone who had an “R” behind their name. Have you always been a Republican? Had you come to the party in later years?

I’ve been a Republican since I was about nine when [Ronald] Reagan was running for reelection. In Georgia, it wasn’t necessarily the most popular position to be in since Jimmy Carter was from Georgia. But I looked around and said, “This guy can do a better job for us.” I was nine years old when I first kind of declared myself. My mother was not very happy. My dad was pleased.

And throughout your career, you’d been interested in politics? I’m just trying to get a sense of where you came from.

My very first campaign I ever volunteered for, I was 15 years old. It was 1986 for the reelection campaign for Mack Mattingly. By 1988, I was 17 years old, starting University of Georgia, and one of the first things I did was join College Republicans. I ended up being executive director to the chairman of College Republicans for three different chairmen during that time there. I was working campaigns in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So yeah, I’ve been in Republican politics as an operative and a volunteer since before I could drive a car. So yeah, I’ve been at it for a while.

So tell me about your boss, about Brad Raffensperger. Who is he, and what brought him to that position?

Well, I’ve known him for a few years. When I worked in political consulting, his very first campaign for anything was for city council in a special election in Johns Creek. And Johns Creek is a small city, I think about 75,000, 80,000 people, just north of Atlanta, inside Fulton County. And I had been part of the campaign to make it a city and had run—there were, let me see, seven elected officials in Johns Creek when they first started, and I ran the campaigns for six of them. So I was pretty embedded in Johns Creek in North Fulton, because I’m from Sandy Springs, which is a city just south of there that also had just recently come into being in 2005, and I had run that campaign to make it a city.

So he ran for city council, and he won, and he served there for a little while. And then there was a special election for a State House seat in Johns Creek, because the woman who had the seat, Lynne Riley, had been tapped by Gov. [Nathan] Deal to, I believe, run the Department of Revenue. So he ran that special election. I wasn’t campaigning at that point anymore. I was out of that business.

He ran a State House race, won that, served two terms in the State House and decided he wanted to move onto something bigger, and the secretary of state’s office was open, and he decided to run for that. He’d been a successful businessman. He was an engineer, which is a rare thing for anybody in politics, because engineers are very mathematical, very linear, not always the biggest personalities out there. You usually think of politicians being lawyers and that kind of stuff.

So he brought a very different take to how to run the office and approach the issues oftentimes. He was very methodical and very logical. But he’s also a very strong Christian, he’s a very strong Republican, and he’s very conservative, which has been sort of funny, in the aftermath of all this, to hear him called a moderate, or even hear myself called a moderate, because I don’t consider my views to be moderate. … He had a line he stole from somebody else, I think. He says he’s conservative, but he’s not angry about it. So it’s a different kind of way of approaching those things.

He wanted to do good government, follow the law, follow the Constitution. He loves reading about the Founding Fathers. He’s a traditional Reagan-type conservative Republican, and I guess I am, too. I’m only 52, and it’s weird to think that I’ve spent 37 years of my life working in this stuff.

And the funny part was when it came to most of the issues and how I approached things, I haven’t changed very much, which is either a good or a bad thing, I guess, depending on your point of view. I’ve kind of watched the party move around me in different ways.

Do you think as we get into all of this stuff, all the allegations about election fraud and how you guys are responding to it, that him being an engineer shaped the way he responded to all of this that would swirl around you?

I think him believing in the truth shaped it more than being an engineer. Now, being an engineer allowed him to lean into the numbers and lean into the data, that he felt very comfortable with that. So he was able to use that as sort of a springboard to discuss everything else, following the law and telling the truth and following the Constitution, because the numbers are the numbers. And as an engineer, you can’t fudge numbers; you can’t recalculate if there’s no new data to have. So I think all that, everything that Brad was fed into that.

So as we get to election night, do you know who won the presidential election by the time we’re in the late evening or the early morning of Election Day?

No, we didn’t. We did not yet, because it was so close that, in every election—and again, I’ve been doing this for a while now; it was like my second or third time running some kind of elections, not running, but monitoring those elections—people always forget a memory card; they always find some stack of ballots somewhere, not because of any conspiracy but because they’re human beings, and there’s literally hundreds of people dealing with thousands of volunteers with millions of voters doing things. There’s going to be mistakes, and we have processes in place to catch those. That’s why we have to reconcile these things.

We had until Friday to get three other buckets of votes in, and there were all the ballots that came in from the absentee by mail, which was obviously huge because of COVID, that came in on Election Day itself before 7:00 p.m. Those all had to get processed, signature-matched and then counted. So I knew that there was a bucket of votes that were still out there.

To answer your question, when I did know what had happened, about 3:00 the next day I was sitting there looking at what was out, knowing what was coming in, and I called the team together and I said, “Look, President Trump’s going to lose by around 10,000 votes.” I was pretty close—11,779. That was my back-of-the-envelope math of knowing the ballots that were still out and where they were coming from and what the likelihood of what they were going to be.

So that’s when we knew. Now, could we foresee what was going to happen? No. Because frankly, from our point of view, we were kind of fighting the last war, because in 2018 we had a Democrat, Stacey Abrams, claiming voter suppression and that her election was stolen and she didn’t concede. So we had spent a lot of time and effort talking to Democrats and the left saying, “Don’t trust misinformation; these elections are going to be very accurate.” We spend a lot of time doing that and didn’t really think so much about the Republicans having those same sets of issues.

So we were not fully prepared for what was coming, but we had an idea what might be coming because of the claims being made in other places.

Let me just go back for a second, because you said that night you don’t know who had won, and if anyone knew, you would. And because Georgia is a key state to winning the presidency, and that’s the night when the president comes out and says, “Frankly, we did win the election,” in the early morning, what do you think when you hear that and knowing what you know about Georgia and where the vote is?

Well, at that point, for Trump and [Joe] Biden, it was so close. For about three days afterwards, three or four days, neither side really claimed Georgia was stolen yet because they would look like idiots if they won. So everybody stayed kind of quiet for a little while, really until the Friday when the military ballots came in. And those are overseas, and they’re allowed, as long as their postmark is by Election Day, they can be accepted through Friday. And then you could also verify provisionals and then cure absentees if there was any issues with those by that Friday. So neither side really said much about that.

Now, Trump already got up and said, “I won.” … Now reading what was going on behind the scenes, people were telling him, “Just go claim victory, and we’ll figure it out later,” basically was what was happening. My gut was saying that that was what he was doing, because I knew that there was no physical way either one of them could absolutely know if they’d won or not. And I had lived through 2000, and I remember in 2000, I was at a convention for swimming pool manufacturers. And at the time, I guess I was still very political, and I was viewed as the guy in the room who knew what was going on, so I remember getting on a table and telling these people, “This is not over. [George W.] Bush is going to win Florida. I’m telling you he’s going to win Florida.” I didn’t know, but I felt like I knew.

So I’ve gone through this before. No, you can’t know for certain. You can ask questions. And that was what was so frustrating. There is a legal process to question these things if you have evidence, and I always assumed, if they were going to do that, they would file; they would go to these states and do those things. And oftentimes, people will file things just for the sole sake of filing them. In 2004, there were people who were filing claims that voting machines—this is going to sound really familiar—flipped votes in Ohio to Bush from [John] Kerry. No evidence of that, but there were lawsuits filed and those kind of things.

And I guess sitting now, in 2023, looking at it from a historical perspective, I’ve kind of seen what’s happened in the political world in general, and I always trace it back to the [Robert] Bork hearings, where one side does something, the other side gets angry about it and says, “Well, I’m justifying this next thing that I’m going to do by doing this.” And then the other side goes, “Oh, no, no. We’re going to top you, and we’re going to justify doing this.” It’s the reason the filibuster has been blown up. It’s the reason we have these kind of hearings.

In 2004, there was like, I think, there was like 40 Democrats who refused to certify the presidential election. And then they look back and say, “Well, this behavior is on a different scale.” I’m like, guys, it’s always going to be a different scale because it’s another year, and you’re pushing the envelope every single time.

And both sides were undermining the institutions. Nobody’s there defending the institutions. They’re so hell-bent that I’ve got to have my policy preference; I’ve got to have my person that I will push any envelope and break any norm to do it. And we’re seeing the consequences of that now.

But over the summer, when there starts to be talk about some fraud in the campaign, talking about the election might be rigged, that mail-in ballots are not secure, are you hearing those allegations, especially from the president?

Oh, yeah. We’re hearing those things, but I’m like, well, that’s just political crap. In my brain, what I was saying was like, you’re tactically being stupid because your voters are older; COVID affects older people; you’re telling them not to trust the easiest way for them to vote. I was thinking in my brain, this is tactically idiotic to be making those kind of claims that early especially.

And it was especially tactically idiotic because the Democrats had this thing, a strategy in place to use absentee ballots pre-COVID. They were really going to focus on the tactics of how to bank votes, which is a very smart tactical thing to do. Republicans had no real strategy on that front, and they were undermining their own if they did.

So when COVID hit, the Democrats were ready, not because of some conspiracy, just because their playbook already played into using these tools, and they already had a lot of stuff in place and were investing millions and millions of dollars to make it work properly. … Literally, if you look what happened in Georgia, 28,000 people skipped the race. I think there was like 30-some-odd-thousand people who voted by mail in the primary who didn’t vote at all in the general. His claims could have been enough to make those people’s behaviors change. He hurt himself.

And I know he goes by his gut, and I don’t think there’s anybody tactically telling him to do these things, make these claims. He went with what he thought was the best thing, which, again, he’s very transactional and very dealing with the thing right in front of his face and right in front of his face only. He’s not looking over the horizon to what this all means.

And again, I’m sort of looking back on it. I’m like, man, what the hell were you thinking? Because it made no tactical sense whatsoever to make the claims; you’re suppressing your own vote doing that.

On the Democrat side, when Stacey Abrams was making claims, it’s a very different thing because she’s saying, “They’re trying to take your vote away. They’re trying to suppress you.” The normal human and the normal American reaction is, “Well, screw that. I’m going to go do it even harder now.” If you’re told, “They’re stealing your vote; it doesn’t count,” you’re like, “Well, then, what’s the point?” You throw up your hands. It made no sense in how people approach their lives and how you tactically try to motivate people to vote.

… So let’s go to that period after the election. You’ve said that there was a three- or four-day period where things were quiet, and you were talking to the press, I think—

Let me rephrase. They weren’t quiet. Nobody on either side knew what to do. They were all kind of up in arms in other states. In Georgia, they’re like, “Well, we’re waiting to see the winner. We’re waiting for the absentees. We’re waiting for the overseas military voters.” And the problem was—I tried to explain this in my press conferences—that there was, I can’t remember how many ballots it was now. I think it was like 17,000 had been asked for, but 8,000 had come back. There were maybe 10,000 or so left.

And I said, “Look, between Tuesday and Friday, it’s going to be more than zero, and it’s going to be less than 10,000. However many ballots it is, I have no way of knowing because they’re in the mail. There’s just no way to know.” But since that was so close to the margin, I think some people were saying all those votes will go to President Trump, which they never were going. That mathematically is not going to happen and wasn’t going to be all of them.

So there were still things out there. There was still potential reconciliation, still potentially finding ballots, which we did find a few thousand ballots that broke to President Trump, which took the margin from 14,000 down to that 11,779. And that was through the reconciliation process and what we had to do, because in Floyd County, we saw on the day of the election that there was about 2,400 people who had checked into vote early, and those ballots were not represented in the things. And we said, “Guys, you’ve got about 2,400 ballots out there. You need to go find those.” And they did. It was because a machine had gone out; they intended to rescan them, and they didn’t. They just got caught up in the processes and forgot.

Again, human error, not a conspiracy. And through our processes, we found those ballots. They found those ballots. We added them to the totals, and that’s how President Trump got a little bit closer.

And again, across the country, it’s tens of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of volunteers and millions and millions of votes. There’s going to be mistakes; there’s going to be foul-ups. We have processes to catch most of them, but it’s impossible, with that many human beings doing anything, to not have errors. But we saw nothing on the error side, definitely nothing on the fraud side that would ever say the outcome was in doubt in Georgia.

So both campaigns are stepping back and waiting to see what happens, but by Nov. 7 is the date that the networks announced the winner. It’s the same time that Rudy Giuliani is at Four Seasons Total Landscaping proclaiming fraud in the election. What happens around that time, on that day, as the networks proclaim President [Biden] to win? Are you seeing things differently from your side? What are you thinking as you’re watching that?

Well, I’m thinking, watching what’s happening in other states that, OK, the whirlwind is about to come our way. I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet, but it’s going to come our way. And by Nov. 9, we saw what that whirlwind was going to look like.

I remember in the morning, I got a text from someone who used to work in our office who was working on one of the senatorial campaigns, and it was the press release with Senators [David] Perdue and [Kelly] Leffler calling for Secretary Raffensperger to resign. And I literally texted back, “Ha ha, funny joke.” And they were like, “No, no, this is going out in about five minutes.” And I was like, what? It made no sense. It made no—again, say that Raffensperger should resign because of all these problems, even though they didn’t really list any problems.

And that was when it really turned. And that was the day that Tricia, Secretary Raffensperger’s wife, started getting her sexualized death threats on her phone. The death threats began for most of us. So I put Nov. 9 as the day that kind of really the page turned into what we’ve all seen of the chaos after the fact.

You described it once as a dam breaking on that day. How intense was it when that happened?

It’s hard for me to say now because it all kind of runs together, and—it wasn’t fun, I can tell you that. And I was still doing the daily press conferences and stuff, and my role and my job at that point was to really give out the information in as timely way as we possibly could. And I remember the very first press conference I did post-election. I was kind of channeling back to an episode of The West Wing one time where Alan Alda’s character is running for president, and there was a nuclear accident, and he said, “Well, I’m going to go answer every question the press has until they’re done.” And that was my very first press conference. I said, “I’m going to stand here and answer every single question these guys have.” At the end of it—you can go back and watch on YouTube now—I literally say at the end, “Are you all punched out? Is that it?” They had nothing else they could ask.

So my job was to basically answer every question until they had no more questions to ask. And we did that literally every day, and sometimes twice a day, trying to keep things going and explain what was happening. It wasn’t fun having the Republican president and his team, who we had voted for because we were all—Secretary Raffensperger is a Republican; the staff’s Republican; all of the upper staff are Republican.

So when we were taking these hits, it was kind of like, it didn’t make sense. But I knew I was right. Somebody asked me at one point, about a year or two later, said, “What if people around you in the office had said, ‘We should now embrace Stop the Steal?’” And I was like, “That wasn’t going to happen.” “Well, what if it did?” “Well, it wasn’t going to happen because we weren’t going to lie; we weren’t going to cheat.” “What if they had said, politically, we just have to do this?” I said, “I’d have quit.” I would have quit, because I wasn’t going to be part of a lie.

And so again, it’s hard to think about these hypotheticals on those, but we were in the mix of a radicalized lie, essentially, and from November through December, it just kept on escalating. … I’d gotten a FedEx package at my house that was just crazy, so I had to call the local police. They brought four guys over, including rubber gloves to make sure it was OK. They were like, “Step away from it,” because I opened it; I didn’t know what it was at first. But it was like a mix of COVID and election conspiracies and some in Chinese. It was just a weird package.

And we were getting stuff at the office. We were getting email threats, letters. I remember seeing—I’m not sure when Enemies of the People came up. Enemies of the People was a website that had all these people involved in the elections. And I remember it was really odd to me because it started with Gov. [Gretchen] Whitmer as number one. Then number two was me. I’m like, why is it Gov. Whitmer and then me? I looked through, and there’s like 40 of us on there, and Brad and Gov. [Brian] Kemp were much further down. I’m like, I’m the number two target of the Enemies of the People site, and the FBI found—they took it down within two days because the Enemies of the People site had our picture, a picture of our house, our address listed, our personal phone numbers listed and personal emails listed. …

I got a police car outside of my house because I’d been on the city council in Sandy Springs, where I live, and I called the mayor, who said, “We’ll talk to the chief and see what we can do.” I couldn’t get actual security. So when I got interviewed about, “How’s your security?,” I was like, “We don’t talk about my security mainly because I don’t have any security.” … If you say you don’t talk about it, it makes it seem like a very super-secret plan for security.

And it was worth thinking about it that way. And I didn’t know—I always felt like I’m handling this really well; this is great. And one time, my fiancée at the time came to the house at a point when I was not anticipating her coming to the house, and I heard the door open, and I kind of jumped a little bit. So maybe I was a little more on edge than I thought or gave myself credit for being. …

I live in sort of what I would call a Republican-ish area. There’s at least an amount of Democrats there, too. It’s a little more Democrat now post-Trump because a lot of people who used to be Republicans switched their votes to Democrats. And I got a lot of attaboys when I went to the grocery store. It wasn’t all, “Everything’s terrible; you’re going to die; we’re going to hang you.”

That was one thing: They used a lot of noose imagery when they’re doing the death threats. That was a really big thing. But I would get people thanking us. So I got a lot of positive reinforcement at the same time I was getting this negative attack, so I felt a little bolstered. It wasn’t like I was all getting negative, negative input all the time. So that helped me kind of get through a lot of that.

… During this period, are you hearing all of these allegations? Are you looking into them? Are you finding anything?

Yeah, we hear the allegations. One of the issues we had is there were so many coming in. Our office only has like 20 investigators, and they don’t just do elections; they investigate things around licensing and corporations and securities and cemeteries, and all those stuff. So we’re getting flooded with them. And the problem was a lot of them were, “Well, I was watching Fox News and they said this.” Like, “That’s not an actual claim. That’s not something we can go investigate.”

We had individuals who came in with actual claims. And as an example, there was one person from Cobb County who had been an employee who said, “We were told not to do signature match.” OK, that’s a real claim from somebody who has actual information in a position to know that. So we really focused efforts on that. So we actually did a signature audit in Cobb County because we had real factual evidence to go after.

The generalized claim of, “They used drop boxes”—well, that was OK, because there was an emergency order that allowed them to use drop boxes. “They didn’t do signature match.” “Well, do you have any proof of that?” “Well, we know they didn’t.” “No, we can’t investigate that.”

There was another particular one. I loved this, too. There were signed affidavits that said these things. Affidavits are part of an evidentiary chain, and they can be used as evidence if they can lead to other things. There was one woman who claimed to have seen pristine ballots that were not folded and all stacked and heavily favored Biden. This is in Fulton County. It was in this batch number. We literally sent two investigators, pulled the batch, they went through every single ballot. None of them were pristine. They went back to this woman and said, “We’ve investigated this batch, and there’s no non-pristine. They’re all regular absentee ballots in this batch.” And then she giggles: “Well, maybe it’s this batch.” The batch number didn’t exist. So you can’t go through all half a million of these. And also, there are legitimate reasons to have pristine ballots—emergency ballots won’t be folded; provisional ballots won’t be folded; duplicated ballots won’t be folded. So again, a pristine ballot in and of itself is not a crime.

And one of the other things that happened was Fulton County had a COVID outbreak in their warehouse about two or three weeks before, and they went to what they called Plan C, where they printed an absentee ballot or a hand-marked ballot for every single polling location because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to do the logic and accuracy testing on the computers, on the machines. They eventually did, but they had all these ballots sitting in plain view, all shrink-wrapped, stacked together, labeled.

And people said, “They’ve got all these fake ballots.” No, those are real ballots; they were there for a purpose that they didn’t need. And that’s not a conspiracy. And the fact they’re all sitting there, if they were there and then they were gone and some new ballots showed up, that would be a problem.

But there’s all these specific things that we know. We have almost every ballot cast tied back to an individual voter. Every absentee ballot was requested by an individual voter. And there’s a lot of confusion because of a couple of things:

People would send out absentee ballot requests to people who had already requested them, and they would get—I remember this one phone call came in. A woman talked to our general counsel, said, “Well, I’ve got like the ninth one of these absentee ballot requests, and I filled it out again and sent it back in, but what’s really annoying is, I’m not planning on voting absentee. I’m going to vote in person anyway.” And our counsel is like, “No, just don’t send it in. You don’t have to. It’s not required,” because people will get confused by that. …

But every ballot that went out was tied back to a voter. Every person who voted in person had to show ID. We reconcile the votes to the check-ins and to the signatures. There’s lots of processes to go through the stuff.

And then, when we did the hand tally, … that did help in one really big way of knocking back one theory in Georgia, which was that the Dominion machines were doing fractional votes or flipping votes, because it came on essentially dead-on accurate; it was .1053% off in the number of ballots cast and .0099% off in the margin, which, studies show—and a hand count usually can be off 2% or so, because human beings are terrible at counting things, but because we had ballot-marking-device ballots, which is easy to read and count, we were able to do those counts, and we did it in five days. And I think it really helped kill a lot of those, especially for our elected officials, who were really concerned about this because their people were concerned about this. And that kind of killed a lot of that. So that was good.

But they kept on recycling these things. If I have to hear about suitcases, magic suitcases of ballots coming out from under a table as a way to steal the election—it is now late 2023, and I still see that on Twitter, and I still see that come around on emails of how they stole the election in Georgia when it’s like, we’ve got videotapes showing what all happened in all these places.

“The election monitors were thrown out.” We have affidavits from the election monitors saying, “We were not thrown out. We just thought it was time to go, so we all got up and left.”

And then, even in the Rudy Giuliani presentation, at the beginning of it, one of the people said, “And here you can see them being thrown out, and they started counting, which is illegal to do.” It’s not illegal. They can have monitors there, but they can still continue to do processing without monitors there. So it’s not illegal.

It’s just frustrating because the laws are different in every state, which is actually a security feature, because if all the laws and processes were the same, it would be easy for bad actors to break them. … I think we spent so much time trying to work on that that it was just very difficult to keep up with it, and I think I even said this in the press conferences: It’s like playing whack-a-mole every time, because it’s this, I knocked down that a few weeks ago; it’s back up again, so I’ve got to knock it down again. So it was just, you were never going to catch up because they would just recycle, because new people would see the claim the first time. And there were bots out there pushing it, and there was all the stuff kind of keeping that ecosystem of lies rolling.

… When you hear this claim about the Dominion machines, what do you think of it? And then why does the hand count matter to that claim?

Well, out of the gate, it’s utterly ridiculous. So the main thing is, through all these processes, we have a paper ballot. We have a record of how the individual voted. We had a ballot-marking-device ballot, which is what’s produced when you vote in person, where you do a touchscreen and it prints off a ballot with your choices on it, you can see it; or the hand-marked paper ballot, which is the absentee ballot. There is a record of the voter’s choice.

So there was a little over 5 million ballots cast in Georgia, which was a record, and since we were in the middle of a pandemic, that was pretty impressive we were able to pull that off. So the claim was that the Dominion machines were flipping votes or doing what’s called fractional votes, which made even less sense, because if you have a fractional vote, you’d have .2 and .8 votes. A lot of these claims just didn’t make sense, but that’s—it sounds villainous. We all hated fractions when we were kids, so “fractional” sounds terrible.

So what we did was, the new law that had been passed in 2019, called HB 316, we had to do an audit of some kind. So we had chosen a risk-limiting audit, which was going to be what we were going to do, and which statewide race we audited was up to the secretary. And we could have chosen any of the statewide races, but we all knew that would be a copout. We had to do the presidential race. But because it was so close, the math required—the whole point of a risk-limiting audit is, you have to look at only a certain percentage of ballots to reach a 90% or 95% certitude that the outcome was correct, our confidence level.

And so basically, we chose to go do the presidential at essentially 100% confidence level. Even at 95, we’d have had to pull like 40% of the ballots to get to it. So it was logistically easier to literally hand-count every single of those 5 million ballots in all 159 counties.

So we organized it, and we had a system called Arlo to load everything into. And there’s been a lot of misunderstanding around how this all works. You’re not trying to recreate the election; you’re trying to, in the aggregate, show that the machines properly counted the ballots as marked. All you’re trying to do is prove the machines did what we said they were going to do and validate the victor. That’s why you don’t take—it’s not precinct-level data. It’s just literally we’re taking all the ballots in each county; here’s the aggregate count together.

And because human beings are doing it, you absolutely know there’s going to be mistakes because, again, human beings are terrible at counting things, which is why we moved to machines to begin with, to avoid human error.

So we did the hand count, and in the hand count, it showed that the machines absolutely counted the ballots as presented to them, which was .1053% off in the total votes cast and .0099% off in the margin. Again, if you look at university studies, I think Rice University had the most comprehensive study on this, when you do hand counts, you can normally expect to be 1%-2% off, sometimes up to 3% off, depending on the bucket, the size of your counting, and how many human beings are doing it, because the thing is, errors will kind of balance out over time, because you don’t have errors all one direction or all other direction, but you’re going to be off. But by being that close, it showed that the machines were just dead-on accurate for the ballots as presented, which kind of took away that arguing point. At least for the elected officials, the state House and state Senate members that I talked to, that kind of showed them, well, that’s one of the conspiracies we can put to the side.

Now, for voters out there, that’s still a conspiracy that’s out there. And the ironic part to me was the reason this whole thing with Dominion started was, there was one little county in Michigan called Antrim County, where a clerk—and it was a one-person clerk office there, and it is a Republican County—she forgot to put a school board race on one of her scanners, on one of her precincts. So I ended up calling to the CEO of Dominion, who put me in charge with her vendor, who was a sub-vendor to them. Basically what they did was rebuild the election project.

And they even told her, “Hey, you can’t just do this one thing on this one scanner. You have to put the election project on all of your scanners now. Otherwise, it’s going to read incorrectly,” which is essentially what happened. She only put it on the one scanner, and while it counted correctly on the scanners themselves, like the tapes were correct, when they went to their collection-night reporting system, it went in improperly. It’s kind of like you have a formula set in an Excel spreadsheet, and you sometimes take a column away; it’s all going to screw up. That’s essentially what happened there.

And they knew, they saw that night. And within 18 hours of discovering it, they had fixed it; they had gone through and re-reported it. But because it was initial things going out that showed Biden winning Antrim County, which is not going to happen ever—it’s a 70% Republican county; I think he ended up winning it with like 60%, something like that—that began, that gave enough of a narrative to start the Dominion system flipping-vote stories, and they kind of stuck with it because they saw that they had those in Georgia and in Pennsylvania and in Michigan and in Arizona. So those were the places that were fighting over anyway, so it kind of was a perfect storm.

That one human error got blown up into an entire set of conspiracy theories. And it kind of shows you the danger of these things and the power of social media, and having one person just relentlessly tell you the story over and over again.

And by the time you guys have counted it by hand, that should definitely have put it to rest, but it doesn’t. That was my next question. You said one person relentlessly repeating it over and over again. The president of the United States tweeting general allegations and very specific allegations of fraud over this period, what effect is that having, Donald Trump’s tweets?

Well, obviously it has a tremendous impact on his voters, because no one ever wants to lose; everyone wants to be on the winning side. And you assume, especially now as siloed as our culture is, it goes back to that 1972 New York Times story, where the woman in Manhattan says, “I don’t know how Nixon won; everybody I know voted for McGovern.” It’s kind of like, we’re all in that situation now where Democrats and Republicans don’t interact with each other, so literally every Republican knows only other Republicans who all voted for Trump. How could he not have won in our state? It doesn’t make any sense.

… So there’s a long history of that, of accepting it if your side loses—the other side obviously cheated because nobody you know voted for those guys. So that’s part of the reason we have this issue now is that people are tearing at the institutions, and there’s nobody defending the institutions, or they’re only defending it when their side wins.

I’ll say this for Secretary Raffensperger and our office. We fought Stacey Abrams’ claims and won in court. Literally, we won in court; every single one of her claims were dismissed. We fought Trump’s claims in court; all those things were dismissed or withdrawn. We’re defending the institutions. We’re defending voting; we’re defending voters’ rights. And we’re getting attacked from the left and the right, which makes me think we’re probably doing a good job.

But in 2020, these are allegations unlike any other. But the question is, is it coming from the top because voters are distrustful, or is the president’s constant tweets, constantly talking about it, driving it?

It’s driving it, but it’s fertile soil, which is why it’s so readily absorbed. I’m trying to look at it from both sides. I think if he thought it wasn’t getting absorbed, he’d have found a different tactic. He would have used a different set of stories to try to do it. But the thing is, it was such fertile territory, it made it easy for him. He saw himself getting traction with it, with his base. And I always wonder, because he was raising tons of money at the same time, and this money was supposed to go towards the legal fight and all those kind of things. And I don’t know what percentage of it, but it’s a very small percentage actually went to that. He’s going to these small-dollar donors over and over: “Send $5 now.” “Send $25 now.”

And his surrogates are doing the same thing. Rudy’s out there raising money. Michael Flynn’s out there raising money. They’re all raising money on these things. And so they have incentives. The incentives are backwards. The incentives ought to be to tell the truth and follow the law, and then you get rewarded by the American public. And that’s not what’s happening now. If you tell these lies and people agree with what you’re saying because it’s the outcome they want to see, they will give you money, and your favorables go up with them even as your unfavorables go up with the rest of the country.

The outcomes are different on those fronts. Look at [Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene. She’s one of the most successful fundraisers in Congress based on saying radical, over-the-top stuff to get clicks and get people to like me, because, yeah, stick it to them. So that’s—the incentives are backwards. Same thing with AOC; she says crazy, radical things on the other side, and she raises tons of money.

Being a boring, methodical, law-following governing person doesn’t get you clicks and likes. It just doesn’t, because it’s boring.

What do you make of it now? Something you might not have known before, but if you say Dominion, any of them, if you go and you look at the January 6 Committee, others, what the president was told— [Trump adviser] Jason Miller or even [chief of staff] Mark Meadows, [press secretary] Kayleigh McEnany, Bill Barr, the attorney general, repeatedly telling the president that the claims that he was repeating were not true. Now, as you look back, and having lived through that moment that you described, what do you make of that, that he was told repeatedly by very respectable officials that the claims weren’t true?

It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He chose to listen to the things he wanted to hear.

… To your mind, does that make him more responsible?

Look, President Trump is 100% responsible for all of this. His behaviors, his inability to accept the fact that he did actually lose, has—what’s frustrating for me as a Republican is since he’s been elected, we’ve gotten our heads handed to us. We’ve lost the Senate; we’ve lost the House; we lost the presidency. In most of American history, when your leader loses elections, the party goes, “Maybe we should stop doing that thing if it’s making us lose elections.” But instead they’re doubling down. …

So let’s go to the run-up to that Dec. 1 press conference. You talked about the threats. Was it getting worse as you were getting towards the end of November? What was it that you were seeing that was so concerning?

Well, it’s hard to say because it’s sort of like, you get numb to it after a while. I think it’s sort of a human coping mechanism when you have so much chaos around you. And I remember I said once [that] every new threat I’m stacking up like cordwood in the back. It’s just, “Oh, here’s another one; all right, stack it up here. Here’s another threat; stack it up here.”

… I kind of think I know what made me lose it on that day. I was at lunch at a little place down the street from the Capitol. It’s a place that lobbyists didn’t usually go to and elected officials didn’t really go to, so that’s probably the reason I like going to it, because I wouldn’t get bothered that much. And I remember getting the phone call from the VP of operations of Dominion, who was—she graduated the Naval Academy, got an MBA from MIT, had come out of the gaming industry. She was tough as nails and was, to my mind, pretty unflappable.

But when she called, her voice was audibly shaking, and I could hear that she was upset about what she was telling me. And when I first heard the words that one of our young contractors in Gwinnett County has had a threat against him, and I think his name’s pretty unique, so there are threats going to his family now, and I said, “OK, well, I’ll look it up.” And again, I kind of stacked it with the cordword with other threats I was seeing.

But when I scrolled through Twitter and I got to the threat, I remember it clear as day. It said the young man’s name, “You have committed treason. May God have mercy on your soul,” and it had a slowly turning GIF of a noose in the sun. And for whatever reason, I think because this young man didn’t sign up for any of this. Like many of the poll workers and elections workers, he hadn’t signed up for this. He signed up to be an IT geek working on stuff in the election system.

And when I saw the videos of the men talking about him, and they were using almost some racist tropes in the middle of it, and I saw that thing, I remember—when I get angry, I turn red; it starts around here, and it goes up to the bottom of my ears. And my boss, Jordan Fuchs, was with me, and said, “You seem pretty angry.” I’m like, “I’m pretty angry.” So she called the secretary and said, “Gabe wants to say something. This was starting to get out of hand.” I don’t know what “out of hand” meant, but I guess going to that level of a contract worker getting death threats, that kind of put it over the edge for me, because the secretary and I get death threats, we’re on television; we kind of put ourselves out there. It’s not right, but—I’m not going to say I get it, because it’s never acceptable, but I kind of jumped in front of the things and say, “Hey, I’m saying things you don’t want to hear, so be pissed at me,” I guess.

This guy literally took a job to make some extra money, and him then being in the line of fire seemed patently unfair, morally wrong, and I guess at that point my intellectual side was saying, this is starting to escalate and escalate and escalate; this is going to get out of hand. And that’s why I felt the need to say something.

And again, I’m trying to intellectually piece together what I was feeling at that time now, coming on three years later. And some of this may be selective memory on it; I’m not sure. But that’s kind of what I was going through and what I wanted to get across was that they’ve got to knock these things off. And in retrospect now—at the time, I said, “You’re getting bad information. You lost this election.” Now hearing he was told repeatedly by people in the know that he lost the election and yet he insisted on doing this was even more infuriating to a degree.

And what do you say? Because you have a direct message for the president. You say, “Mr. President.” What were you trying to communicate? What were you saying?

“Knock it off. Be a grown-up. Suck it up. Fight in the courts all you want. Don’t get people to intimidate people or use threats or violence or that kind of language, because it will escalate and spin out,” because, like I said before, going back to the way I view these things, they always escalate. One side does one thing; the other side does something else. They justify the next thing they do, and so on and so on and so on. There’s never a grown-up in the room saying, “Knock it off.”

And I think I struck a chord that day. It was kind of funny, though, because I didn’t realize it until many hours later, because my fiancée at the time, my now wife, had gotten a job offer that day, and I told her at 11:00 that morning, “Today is all about you, baby. We’re going to go out to dinner. We’ll do great stuff.” So I literally turned off my phone. I turned off the ringer from, like, 4:00 until, like, 11:00. And I saw one friend of mine when we went to dinner, said, “Hey, great job today.” And I assumed he’d seen that local television because at that point, it had been like a month and a half I’d been on television doing stuff.

And then I got home, and I was getting texts, like, “Oh, you’re trending on Twitter.” I’m like, great, what does that mean? So I looked it up, and I went from like 2,000 Twitter followers to like 30,000, and it became an international thing. So it was a little weird.

Going back to what I was trying to tell the president was, presidents are supposed to be the best of us. They’re supposed to lead us through tough times, not create tough times. They’re supposed to be an example to our citizenry and our kids, not be a warning to them to, to don’t do this. And that’s what was happening, and it was one of my own party. And it was frustrating.

And I remember, I had no script. In fact, I didn’t realize I was going to call out the president and the senators until I was literally saying the words out loud at the time. And I remember saying one point, “If you’re actually in a position of leadership, show some.” I was frustrated. At that point, I had snapped. It turned into a roll after that. I think the whole thing was maybe 20 minutes or so. And I was angry.

And I’m still angry, but I’m not going to be popping off about. It has been three years. It’s unfortunate because I think it’s hurt the nation. I think it’s hurt my party. I think it’s hurt the values that I have fought nearly 40 years of my life for. And I’m not going to stop being a Republican. I’m not going to stop fighting for the same things I’ve been fighting for the whole time. But some of the big ones on that one are following the Constitution, following the rule of law, telling the truth. As long as there’s breath in my body, I’m going to keep on doing the same thing.

Did you think that the president, a man you had voted for, that he just didn’t understand the effect that his words were having and that if you could explain to him that you might be able to change something?

I don’t think it was that logical. I think he was—and I’m not trying to justify what he’s doing. I’ve been trying to intellectually understand where he probably was. In his mind, he was fighting for his political life, and he didn’t have any boundaries in doing that, which this kind of shows you what happens if you don’t have boundaries. Boundaries are really good things to have.

In retrospect, now that we have the more of this information, it’s frustrating; it’s off-putting. His own selfishness has caused this much chaos. His own selfishness has caused the issues that we’ve had. I know there are millions of his supporters who love him, and part of the reason they love him is because “he’s a fighter; he fights for us.”

And I think, again, another thing that I think the media and the left really have never understood is what this adoration comes from for him. And a lot of it is, for 50 years in this culture, people who share my values feel like they’ve had sand kicked in their face. They feel like the media laughs at them; liberals think they’re all morons, and they tell them so. You watch MSNBC, that’s the feeling you get, is that anybody who believes things that I believe are idiots. And Reagan fought for the things that these people believed in. Gingrich did. Paul Ryan did. The local congressmen did.

But what Trump did was he hit the other side of the mouth. And there was sort of an enjoyment for that, because they hadn’t had that outlet ever. Nobody really hit them in the mouth. Reagan was funny, making fun of them. But Trump was just like, “Screw you guys. I’m hitting them.” It was a level that they hadn’t seen in a while, and it made them feel better because somebody’s finally really hitting these guys back, putting on their heels. And that’s part of the reason that they do love him.

And the other thing that they don’t get was, out of the gate—and this is me, Gabe Sterling, noted person who calls out Trump on stuff—the media and the left, he had zero honeymoon. The second he started, Russiagate, which as we know now was essentially nothing other than a made-up thing coming out of the Clinton campaign, but they rode that horse for years.

So Trump felt justified in pushing some of these things because if they’re going to lie about me, I’m going to about them, and it’s all fair because that’s what they did to me. I get accused of bothsiderism because I see both sides doing bad things and justifying it because they care so much about the values they want to fight for that they’re going to forget the truth, forget the law, forget institutions; I’ve just got to win.

And that’s a problem. The institutions are there to keep the country from falling apart. If we tear apart the institutions, if both sides do it, both sides will end losing as we lose the way the country’s supposed to work. … And this has been a thing going on 50 years, incrementally, incrementally, incrementally. One of the problems we have now is Barack Obama saying, “I have a phone and a pen.” So executive order is all one way. You reelect the next president, the executive order’s all the other way. So we lose a lot of stability we’ve had for 200 years of our country.

And Trump’s outcome from these things is, unfortunately, almost a logical outcome, because there aren’t any barriers anymore. If they’re going to lie, then it’s OK for me to lie because I’m lying to get the right thing done at the end. And the Democrats say the same things.

… It’s always win or lose; that’s it. And this zero-sum games we have are going to end up biting us all. It hurts the nation, and it hurts our ability to get things done. And that’s the outcome, the really, really terrible thing of the lies around the 2020 election.

As you know, that moment was big at the time, and it’s big in retrospect because of what happens on Jan. 6. Was it obvious to you then? Should it have been obvious to everyone, what you were warning about, about the potential for violence, about the potential for as, as you say, “Somebody’s going to get hurt, somebody’s going to get shot, somebody’s going to get killed”?

You say, “You were so prescient.” I wasn’t that prescient; I’ve read a history book. This is not hard to see. When people raise the level like this and increase the temperature, people snap. That doesn’t take a magic crystal ball to see the outcomes from this kind of language in this continuous set of stirring people up emotionally. This is what happens.

… I guess what I was was, I was a Republican saying it in a forceful way against my president, and that’s why I got more coverage, but it doesn’t take much to see that that was going to be the outcome from this. And unfortunately, it finally was.

And there’s been little things that happened up here. We still to this day, there are people resigning their offices in elections offices because they can’t deal with it anymore. And we are losing institutional knowledge, which then leads to more problems with elections, which then feeds the conspiracy theories.

It’s not rocket science. When people’s emotions are charged and they say, “That guy did it,” you’re going to go after that guy. A lot of it is human nature. And Trump does a great job of playing to people’s emotions on that and using human nature.

It’s true. If you had done, or the secretary had done what was being accused—rigged the election, stolen the vote, were an “enemy of the people,” committed treason—those are pretty serious charges that were being leveled constantly.

Yes. I just want to know where all my Chinese money is. I got accused of taking millions of yuans, and it’s just patently absurd. But the incentives are wrong. A lot of people get clicks. To this day, there’s certain Twitter accounts that are just consistently still churning this out. No citations, no links. At least someone go to the trouble of putting links to something. And it’s out there every day. I’m sort of steeping in it now at this point, you know.

It went down for a little while through 2022, and since 2022, it’s really picked back up again, I guess in preparation for 2024.

Was Donald Trump on notice after you give that speech? Because one of the things I hadn’t realized, but it was in the Jan. 6 report, was that he retweets a video of you issuing that warning. He uses it to say, “Rigged election. Expose the fraud in Georgia.” But was he on notice from that point forward about the danger of his rhetoric and the potential for violence?

I don’t know that the president would tend to listen to the voting system implementation manager from Georgia for warnings of that kind. It wasn’t just me. His own staff was telling him he lost the election. His own staff was watching what was happening. He chose to ignore people. He chose to take this path. He has, as flawed as he is, he has very good instincts for understanding what his base for the American public wants to hear and see. And you can’t discount that. And he’s, again, raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He is the leading contender for the Republican nomination right now.

I do find a certain irony for this. If he had said nothing, I think he’d be waltzing back to the nomination right now, and even back into the White House, if he had said—if he’d just taken the loss, taken it like Nixon did in 1960. But I don’t think he’s capable of doing that. I think he has to have the limelight on him all the time, be it good, bad or different. I guess he follows the old policy of no such thing as bad publicity.

But it’s in retrospect. He might say now that he wouldn’t be there because other people would have filled the vacuum, which maybe they would have. And even at the time, in my Dec. 1 speech, I said, “Listen, you want to run for reelection, fine, go for it. Fight your fight in the courts. But what you don’t want to do is let people use intimidation and language of threats and physical violence, because that’s just wrong.”

And he would never take responsibility for any of this stuff. To this point, he said, “Jan. 6: What was the big deal?,” which is insane to me. I worked on Capitol Hill. That place is a sacred place. That’s the people’s house, and what happened to that was a disgrace. And he had the opportunity. He kindled it. He had the opportunity to stop it. He didn’t. He disappeared for several hours, didn’t say anything. We’ve got the transcripts of the texts and the calls they had. He knew what was happening. It looks to me like he enjoyed it, which just says something more, again, about him than about anybody else.

Two days after you give that, not only have they not backed off, Rudy Giuliani is having hearings with the Georgia Legislature. He and many others are spreading a number of conspiracy theories at this point. … What was your reaction?

Well, we had a Senate hearing that morning. It went on for three hours. Our general counsel, Ryan Germany, answered most of the questions. And it was a typical Senate subcommittee hearing, normal: This is what happened; these are things that occurred; here’s the reason that didn’t happen. It was a very normal, low-key hearing.

We walk out of that, and someone says, “Hey, Rudy Giuliani’s here.” I’m like, “Why? Why would Rudy Giuliani be in Georgia at all?” It didn’t make sense to me. And then I didn’t go watch the hearing; I heard about it after the fact, showing the videotapes. And I recognized everything going on. I’m like, this is not fraud; this is normal.

So yeah, it was very frustrating to watch all that occur. And listen, they had all 48 hours of those security tapes the same way that we had all 48 hours of the security tapes. We were methodically going through, documenting things, doing timelines and stuff, and they just went out there with what they had. Anybody who watches that knows, watches the whole thing, knows there was no fraud happening there. And if they had things they didn’t understand, they could ask questions, like one of the big parts of that was not just the magic suitcases, which were really just ballot carriers that had been put under the table about an hour earlier because they all thought they were going to go home, with numbered seals, so the chain of custody was kept, so nothing ever happened to those things in that one hour, while the video cameras were still on it, and they were placed under there with the monitors and the press in the room.

The secondary part of that was, they were scanning multiple times. And standard operating procedure is, if there’s a mis-scan, you delete that batch, and straighten it up like you do, and then run it through again. And that’s what they were doing. And the reason we know that’s the case is because we had a hand tally which showed the number of ballots matched what was counted. So we know that they didn’t do that.

At that point, we’d already done that. So that was already out of the way. That was a provable thing that had not occurred. And they just kept on keeping on. …Then they cut it into a 30-second ad and started running it across the country to raise money. I mean—

And I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked into the state senators’ eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.

And even if they didn’t know that particular day, you go, I think, work with a local TV station, go out, show the video, release the video. You make the case within a day, is that right?

Yeah, … Again, we had to go through, and we were documenting everything because we are—we have some law enforcement capability because we have post-certified officers, which is, they carry guns and badges and investigate things, so we have to be responsible when we make claims. They should be responsible in their claims given the roles they have; they chose to be irresponsible. And frankly, I think they knew they were lying, especially after that case. And they kept on saying it for months after.

So I think they knowingly lied to these people to try to keep the tip drill going that there was fraud in Georgia.

… Here are Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, two election workers who see their lives overwhelmed. When you see that, that’s exactly what you were worried about, isn’t it?

It’s 100% what I was worried about. And not just that. There were situations in other counties in Georgia, like broken windows and cars. Was it a break-in, or was it somebody trying to intimidate? A dead squirrel left on your front porch. Was that somebody—did a squirrel just die, or was it somebody trying to do things? We can never really know, but their sense of fear was so heightened that everything became that way. People thought they were being followed home. They would take risky things to get away from people. We had, in the runoff election, cars trying to cut off vans that were carrying absentee ballots from drop boxes. It was getting more and more dangerous.

And those are the kind of things I was talking about. And it wasn’t just in Georgia; it was across the country. We saw this happening in Arizona with people who were armed and legally allowed, but they were standing on drop boxes, kind of intimidating. And it just kept on escalating. Again, none of this was hard to see, looking at what was happening.

And the bad part was, for me—or a bad part, not the bad part—a bad part was many people who believed these lies were people who I care about, who are friends, who are family, who I’ve known for years. And trying to argue with them and talk to them about stuff—I remember this one I talked about Jan. 6, and this was a friend, not a family member, educated person. We sat him down. “OK, here’s what’s happening in this particular case.” “OK, I understand that wasn’t fraud.” “Here’s what happened in this particular case.” “I understand it wasn’t fraud.” There were five or six different things we walked him through. And he agreed, “I understand that now that that wasn’t fraud.” At the end he goes, “But I know in my heart they cheated.”

OK, I can’t—I can’t overcome your heart. I can appeal to your brain; I can appeal to your logic; I can appeal to your thought processes. I can’t get over, if you believe it in your heart, I don’t know how to flip that one. No matter how much evidence I show you, it’s never going to be enough. …

Did you know any of the stuff about the so-called fraudulent electors at the time, that there was an effort, separate from challenging the results, but an effort to put together an alternate slate. Were you hearing any of that?

Well, yeah, because—this is one of the things I find a little more incredulous. Most of the people in that room were there because lawyers said, “Hey, we’ve got to protect our rights. If our election challenge comes through, we’ve got to got to do these constitutional things.” And it didn’t seem that weird to me; it kind of made sense. It was in the room—literally, the secretary’s office butts up against the room where they did this, and we knew about it in real time.

Now, again, the people in that room, most of them were just electors who were told by the Republican attorneys, “Hey, do this; protect our rights; not a big deal.” Now, what they did with it in D.C., very different story, trying to get the slate of electors to get the vice president to accept them as opposed to the other electors. But the people who did that, I don’t think they had any inkling that they could be used in that way, honestly. Some of them may have. I’m not sure what the intricacies of those discussions were, because interestingly, we had a situation back in, I want to say May or April, where a couple of journalists from D.C. had called down to our office saying, “Hey, are you hearing anything about kicking this to state legislature or having different elector slates?” I’m like, “Shut up, you crazy person. No one’s talking about that.” But it seems like there might have been discussions as early as May in D.C. about, how do we do this if it goes in those directions?

And again, part of this is, I didn’t consider Georgia to be in play. It just didn’t occur to me that it would be that close in Georgia. It kind of did, but Georgia had been pretty reliably red. Stacey Abrams had come close in 2018, … but the dynamics of turnout changed. But I guess Trump had pissed off so many people with the way he did his things. And you could see in the election results afterwards, nothing was crazy to me. He lost by 11,779 votes, and there were eight counties—six in the metro area and two around the University of Georgia—that David Perdue got 28,000 more votes than he did. People made conscious decisions that “I’ll vote for the rest of the Republicans; I’m not going to vote for this man this time.” And that’s why he lost. And he just—he couldn’t accept it, and his supporters couldn’t accept it.

So in the run-up to the infamous phone call to the secretary, at this point, the Supreme Court has weighed in. The Electoral College has weighed in. We’re at the end of December. He’s tweeting. I think he calls Secretary Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” in a tweet. He’s saying he’s got the votes to flip Georgia. He’s calling investigators at your office. What is the pressure? Because it feels like it should be done at that point. But it seems like you’re also still under tremendous pressure from the president of the United States.

Well, I think it was an attempt at maneuvering to try to pressure us. But at that point, he already called on the secretary to resign. He had called him an “enemy of the people.” He had turned up—basically had gone to the population of Republican primary voters in Georgia and said, “This guy is terrible.” I don’t know what else he could—maybe gotten a kitchen sink somewhere and thrown it at him? How much more pressure can there be?

And we were never going to break. We were never going to crack. It didn’t occur to us, because we were following the law. We had sworn an oath to follow the law, tell the truth and follow the Constitution, so it didn’t really matter how much pressure was put on, because that’s not the role. It shouldn’t matter. He’s not a legislator being pressured to vote one way or another on a bill; that kind of would make sense. This is like, you will do these things under the law, and you swore an oath to do that.

It should never matter how much pressure you come under for that. And anybody who folds to pressure like that and moves out beyond their oath has done a disservice to their voters, to themselves and to God. You swear an oath to God when you do these things, and that’s kind of a big deal.

And the secretary, he was never going to waver. That’s why I loved on the phone call, where basically the challenge you have is your data is just wrong. And for the engineer in Brad, and the guy following the law and the rules, that was just—as simple as it was, it was an eight-second phrase backed to 56 minutes of ranting. So it wiped it all out.

But there was no question all of that pressure—as you say, you’d taken an oath; you knew what the law was. But the ask, was the ask to do something illegal? Was the ask to violate your oath? Is that what the pressure was intended to do?

Listen, I couldn’t tell you for sure because I didn’t know this. I don’t think the president’s a lawyer. He’s not a lawyer. And his good lawyers he had around him, he wasn’t listening to at that point. I think we all kind of figured that out. There was no mechanism in Georgia law to do what he asked, which was to recalculate. That doesn’t exist. There’s no way you could suddenly, “No, no, never mind,” because we had certified the election; we were done. There was nothing else to do. There was no legal remedy outside of a court case to reopen any of this stuff.

So technically speaking, if he had done anything that the president was asking him to do, it would have been a violation of the law. Did Trump fully understand or grasp that? I can’t know for certain. I do know that he had been told at this point now by everybody of any kind of import around him that he lost the election. Bill Barr flat out said the State Farm stuff was “BS.” …

At the time we were hearing that there were kind of two camps around Trump. There was like “Team Normal,” which was, “OK, you lost”—that included the Jared Kushners, Ivanka, Bill Barr, those kind of people—“and it’s time to set up, get ready for the transition, move on the next thing”; and then there was essentially “Team Crazy,” which was like, “It was stolen.” It was the Russians and Chinese and foreign influence and ballot fraud and vote scammers and all these other colorful things, and he chose to go for the vote scammers, even though all the actual evidence from responsible actors were saying, “No, no, you’ve lost. It’s time to move on and be done.”

So the pressure coming at us, again, people talk to me about the pressure before, and I’m like, it was there, but it wasn’t like it was going to have an effect. I think Trump didn’t understand. It just didn’t click with him that someone wouldn’t just give in, because I think that had been his business practice for 50 years. You attack, cajole, do whatever you can to get the transaction done the way you want it done. And I think it was so foreign to him that he just had a lack of understanding, which you could hear the frustration on the phone call, like the, “Give me a break, guys,” and “You’re Republicans, right? You should do—” It just did not occur to him that there was some higher level of loyalty to the law and the Constitution.

It really showed through, I guess, about, I don’t know, at some point a few months later, he said, “We should suspend the Constitution to reinstate me.” I’m like, come on, man. That’s not how any of this works.

Is it hard for the secretary and for you to understand the other part of the president’s perspective, which is, because even if you didn’t know what Bill Barr said to him, although he said it in public to the AP and stuff at the time, the secretary is saying it to him. Every single allegation that the president has, there’s a response. Is it hard to understand that? Because it seems like he’s not really particularly interested in the reality of the allegations. Is it hard to understand his perspective?

No, I get what his perspective was. His perspective was, “I don’t want to be a loser, and if I admit this, then I’m a loser.” That’s one of the worst things in Trump’s life, is to be a loser. And now he’s lost the presidency. He lost the House for us; he lost the Senate. Since he touched everything in our party, he’s kind of a loser, so this is the last thing he has.

You think if you’re in that role, and you try to say, “I’m a better person than that; I wouldn’t do it.” I don’t know. If I saw a path, I think I would do the right thing. I’m pretty I’d do the right thing. And given that I’ve gone through this particular trial of fire, I’m really sure I’d do the right thing. But until you’re there and you think, if I lose, it’s going to mean all these terrible things to the American people, and I’m trying to justify.

And I even get going to court and making sure that your voters are absolutely made sure they’re listened to. But that’s the path; you’ve got to go to court. You can’t just make allegations and throw them out there and stir up all this—get everybody’s blood up and have no proof. Every time they tried to go to court, they would withdraw their things they were trying to prove, or oftentimes, frustrating for them, I’m sure, was they were dismissed for lack of standing, which was, they didn’t ever really get to present their evidence.

So they’ve used that as a rationale, like, “Oh, the courts are against me.” It’s like no, you just didn’t use the tools available to you because you’ve got crappy lawyers around you because all your good lawyers said, “This is stupid; don’t do this.” So he went to crappy lawyers who didn’t know what they were doing, a lot of this stuff.

But when you listen to that phone call, is it clear to you that it’s more than an ask, because there’s a threat there? There’s this talk about what you’re doing is criminal; this is a big risk to you. Is the president threatening the secretary?

Well, I think there’s an irony to it that it’s kind of like—like all men of my age, I’m a fan of The Godfather, and in the scene in Godfather II, when they were talking about the big boss never orders anything, he says, “Hey, that Paulie guy, he’s kind of a problem.” He says that, and then Paulie’s gone, so you don’t have to be explicit on this stuff.

But yeah, it was obvious that there was like, “Oh, this is a criminal thing for you and potentially for your lawyer, Ryan.” I remember that very clearly, listening to that, going, I said, “Well, that’s not good.” Think about it. This is the president. He oversees the Department of Justice. You don’t know what they may or may not do considering everything else they’ve been doing.

So again, I can’t get in his brain. I don’t know for certain. I will never know for certain. But that was a clever—he can easily say, “That was never meant to be a threat; I was just asking questions.” Or it can be, if you want to go back to the person, “That was obviously a threat, and you should know better than that, but I’m never going to say that to you.”

It was cleverly done; I’ll give him credit for that. But the intent was there. It was over. Any lawyer around him would have told him it was over at that point. They were going to certify the election on Jan. 6. And now, looking at his earlier tweets, saying things like, “It’s going to be wild on Jan. 6,” he was preparing. …

This was, again, a tactical rationale to try to do things. And again, it seemed like a tip drill. I don’t think just overcoming—having a few thousand people go attack the Capitol was not going to change the outcome of these things, but it changed the tenor inside the democracy itself, and our entire republic has been affected by it.

I don’t know what the end game was in a lot of these things because it didn’t really make sense, because even if, let’s say we did 100% of what he wanted to do—flip Georgia—he still loses. You still have to get Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, one of those other ones to have enough electoral votes. And all those ships had sailed. And through bad lawyering, he didn’t do some of things he should have done to try to keep it alive if he thought there was actual evidence of fraud or actual evidence of stealing.

Did you listen to the conversation in real time, or did you hear about it from Secretary Raffensperger after it happens, like, “Wow, I just got this call”?

Well, what happened was, … it was on a Saturday and I was on phone with my direct boss, Jordan. And she goes, “Oh, I’ve got to go. We’re getting on a call with the president in one minute.” I’m like, “Wait, wait, what?” Click. [Mimics phone line going dead.] And that was it. So for about 18 hours, I was fuming. I said, “I should have been on that call, darn it, because I know more about this than anybody else does than who had been on the call.”

Then I remember, Washington Post got it, and I put it on my computer on my coffee table. And I was yelling at the computer as I was listening to the call, going, “He’s not right! Tell him this! Do that!” In retrospect now, I’m very, very happy I wasn’t on that call, just looking at it now, because I think the tone and tenor that Ryan and the secretary took was perfect to deal with the response of that. Like I said, him saying, “The challenge you have is that your data is just wrong,” and it was just in that even-keeled, engineer, “I’m just following the rules,” and going up against what is essentially a rant.

I haven’t listened to the call in a couple of years until, I don’t know, a few weeks back, and I actually remember sort of like snickering, because it sounds so unhinged. The president sounded unhinged in large parts of that call. And it was just so over the top. I still can’t believe it even happened, it went down that way, because it was just so patently ridiculous.

Secretary Raffensperger must have sensed danger because he recorded that call.

… The call itself was just so out there, but it was—I’m glad the Washington Post got hold of it because it was able to show kind of what happened. And what I remember basically beforehand was the president tweeted that Raffensperger was a weak man who wasn’t doing his job and wouldn’t tell him the truth. And it was like, OK, well, that’s not the case, sir.

I guess what would happen, the president said he didn’t have any answers to all of these allegations that I had, and that sort of tipped it. … He had the recording.

Yeah, but we’ve answered so many of those things so many times publicly over and over again, privately. “Here’s the letter; here’s the stuff,” over and over and over. But it didn’t fit the narrative he needed, so he was never going to listen. There was never going to be enough evidence for him to listen. At some level, I think he knows he lost, but he’d never admit he lost. And I think he could go to a lie detector today, and he’s so convinced himself that it was stolen, he would pass the lie detector test.

Are you watching his speech on Jan. 6, the president’s speech, where he says, “Fight like hell”? Or have you seen it since?

My problem now is, I can’t remember if I watched in real time or after the fact because we were all in the office because the secretary was working on his letter to Congress. It was a 10-page letter kind of explaining, “Here’s my answer to all these things before you have to go vote tonight on this stuff. I’m telling you, don’t challenge the vote from Georgia. This is correct.”

So we were sitting there. And there was a smaller kind of rally building up around our capitol. I remember standing by the window and looking. There was a guy in tactical gear with an AR-15. I’m like, huh? And we had some Georgia State Patrol security with us, and they said, “Maybe we should go somewhere else.” I’m like—I was turning into Mr. Rambo: “Oh, they’re not going to run me off.” And it took me about 30 seconds to be like, “Maybe it’s a better idea if we do go somewhere else.”

And while we were out in the car, that was when it started breaking, and I started seeing it on, like, Facebook came up, and the radio was playing it. And I got to a TV and was watching. And I was like watching it in disbelief. I remember the first—because I didn’t have it in real time—the first image I saw of it was the sort of the iconic image now of inside the House Rotunda, of desks stacked against the door and security with handguns drawn at the doors and windows. That was the first image I saw of the Capitol riot, and that’s sort of seared in my memory of what was going on at the time.

And again, I’d worked on Capitol Hill. I had friends who work on Capitol Hill. And it was unbelievable to me that it was happening. And it was a sense of moral helplessness of watching it happen that I’m still angry about it to this day. I will never not be angry about what happened on that day.

You say unbelievable, but you had warned about violence. You had seen things building.

Yeah, but still, the fact that there were people attacking police officers inside the nation’s Capitol that had been standing for 100-and-some-odd years, 150 years that way since the Civil War, that in and of itself, that there were thousands of people willing to do that at one time, that was like the highest in escalating scale I could have seen potentially out of what I was seeing.

And it’s just the mentality of mobs. They start going along and going along and escalating and escalating. And you take the individual out of it, look at it and say, “Would you do that?,” “Of course I wouldn’t do that. That’s crazy,” until they’re in it, and that’s what we saw that day.

When you’ve gone back—it sounds like you didn’t see it in real time—when you’ve gone back and you’ve seen the president’s speech or read about it, and he’s talking to that crowd, and he says, “The election’s stolen,” “Different rules apply,” and “You’ve got to fight like hell, or you’re not going to have a country anymore,” what do you see in the president in that morning before the attack?

He was trying to stir the pot. He was trying to get something like that to happen. Again, part of a tip drill. I don’t think it was a strategic plan. I don’t think he said, “They’re going to do this, then we’ll do this, this and this, and that’s how we can get the election back.” I think he said, “Let’s throw it against the wall, see what happens,” kind of thing, and “This is my last-ditch effort.” If we can get it past Jan. 6, you’re in extra-constitutional territory at that point. They would have to go to the courts to figure out what happened and what to do. I think it was a lunatic plan; it didn’t make any sense.

But does it make you angry? Because we saw your emotion on Dec. 1.

Of course it made me angry. It was insane. I’m an institutionalist. He’s basically saying, “Let’s tear down the institutions so that I can be made whole.” It wasn’t about the country. He was using this, and his language, it was all about him. But for his supporters, he has become the embodiment for them in many ways.

And again, I try to be as empathetic and sympathetic as I can because there are tens of millions of good people who watch him and listen to him and think that he is their savior to a degree. And watching what’s happening now, like what’s happening in my country, they’re so disconnected from it that playing on these cleaves in society versus the things that kind of join us together has been the part and parcel for the last 15, 20 years or so of politics. And this is a logical outcome is the thing that really scares me; that he has played this string all the way out on the populist side, on the right. …

This kind of violence is very in your face, went to the world in social media time, and there was a singular individual you could look at to blame, and it was Donald Trump. So again, if you read history books, populism has these waves. And normally, the normal political system will sort of start to absorb parts of it, put part of those policies in place, and then kind of the steam’s let out of the kettle and you move on. In this case, the heat has been kept on and the kettle lid has been kept on; there’s been no steam release or very little of it, and that does make me continue to worry moving forward.

There have been a lot of efforts to deal with what happened afterwards, and one of them was the January 6 Committee, where you testified. Can you tell me about that, about why you testified? Did you have hopes for what the committee might be able to do?

Well, I was subpoenaed. That was one reason I testified. Listen, from my point of view, I was there as a fact witness. I was there to answer their questions honestly and explain what happened and make that part of the final record of what was going on out of Jan. 6 and the 2020 election and the aftermath thereof.

I think the Republicans made a tactical error in not working with the committee, and I think Pelosi made a tactical error in not letting the Republicans choose who they wanted to have on the committee, because again, that sort of broke down what had happened previously in the Congress. So it became a very one-sided thing.

But now, all the evidence they produced is real evidence. I have no question about that. And the testimony I saw was compelling—from the police, from Ruby Freeman, from the secretary, from Rusty Bowers, from all these people who saw these things. And then you saw the interviews with Bill Barr and his team. It was all necessary to get there to—now I think we have a much clearer record the president very clearly knew that he lost and that everything he did outside of that was outside of the general rules and bounds of laws and going to courts and everything to try to do anything to hold on.

And knowing that now is even more frustrating, because without that in an organized kind of way, I don’t think we’d have as much information on that front. So I think on that point, they probably did a pretty good job.

But there’s always multiple angles to these stories. And people pay the price. Liz Cheney lost; I think nearly every member who voted for impeachment lost, every Republican member. And the secretary in our state won. And in fact, Secretary Raffensperger won the biggest margin of anybody who got reelected in the state. He beat back a Republican who was endorsed by a congressman endorsed by Trump, who outspent the secretary and still won in the primary by over 20 points.

The American voters will stand with people who tell the truth and stay true to their convictions. I think some people who lost, not so much ones who voted impeachment but some other ones, who try to play footsies with the election deniers and try to keep the traditional Republicans in line, too, they end up pissing off both sides and losing.

The secretary has never wavered. He is still a conservative Republican. He told the truth. He followed the law. He still believes in conservative values, believes in voter ID. People ask, “Why don’t you switch parties?” I’m never going to switch parties. I think the Democratic ideas are bad for America in the long term; I just do. It’s to my core of my being. But I’m not going to put me winning over truth, the law and the Constitution, because that’s part of what that being is.

So they did their job. It was a little one-sided, but that’s because the Republicans basically handed it off to them. Speaker Pelosi did a good job of tactically outmaneuvering them on it and putting it the way that she wanted to get it there.

What was it like to walk into the room? Just physically, what is it like, and what’s it like to be sworn in and to tell your story? Is it different than telling it to FRONTLINE or 60 Minutes?

Well, it’s obviously—the room they used—I can’t remember the name of it now—was built to shock and awe. It’s a gigantic room, huge high ceilings. It was intended to do that. I worked in Congress before, so—I’d never been in that room, but I’ve been a lot of the rooms, and they’re intended to bring the awe of government down on you.

And I remember the bizarre thing. You walk in, you’re in your best suit, you’re on television, and you go to the table, and there’s literally like 200 cameras in your face, all taking your picture. And that’s a little surreal. And then we sat down and—I’m trying—who questioned—oh, yeah, what’s his name? Schiff. I remember they told me he was going to question me. I’m like, damn it, I can’t stand that guy. He irritates me to death because I think he’s wrong and doesn’t tell the truth a lot. So I was so irritated by the whole process.

But I said, you know what? I’m just going to play this straight. I’m a fact witness. Just answer the questions. Don’t try to get cute. Don’t try to play a game. Just answer the questions honestly and then move on and get through it. That’s kind of my attitude on that.

And the importance of doing it under oath and for the record, a story you told many times before, but was it different to do it before Congress in that circumstance?

It definitely felt different. There’s 100 cameras on you. It’s a giant room. There’s elected officials all in front of you you’ve seen on television for the last 20 years. So yeah, it feels a little bit different than saying in front of a camera or going to your press conference outside 30 steps from your office. So it felt different, there’s no question, sitting there next to Secretary Raffensperger and the speaker of the Arizona House.

And again, I want to give some perspective for this. I was a voting system implementation manager. I was a bureaucrat of all bureaucrats basically at that time. No one should know who the hell I am. So I’m up there sitting next to an elected official, next to another elected official. I didn’t spend a lot of money to be out there. I just was doing my job. So it was still on that level surreal, but I’d kind of come to accept the point that I had done something that had basically been a moment, for lack of a better word, that then was going to be the reason I’m talking to you today.

Had I not lost my temper one time after lunch on Dec. 1 in 2020, I wouldn’t be talking to you today. So listen, to this point, talking to you is surreal. There’s just no—it’s just bizarre.