Ordinarily, when governors certify election results, it’s not altogether memorable. On the contrary, it’s a routine part of a bureaucratic process that’s easily overlooked.
But when then-Gov. Doug Ducey certified Arizona’s 2020 election results about a month after voters cast their ballots, it stood out. As the Republican sat down to sign the election documents, his cellphone rang, and microphones picked up a specific ringtone: It was “Hail to the Chief.” Ducey had assigned this to Donald Trump’s number so he wouldn’t miss calls from the then-president.
The governor did not, however, answer the call: On camera, the Arizonan removed the phone from his pocket, saw it was Trump, silenced his phone, signed the papers, and completed the process.
There was no great mystery as to why the then-president was calling the governor at that specific moment: Trump had just narrowly lost in Arizona, and he didn’t want Ducey to certify the results.
But it now appears that Dec. 2, 2020, call was just part of a larger outreach effort. The Washington Post reported over the weekend:
In a phone call in late 2020, President Donald Trump tried to pressure Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) to overturn the state’s presidential election results, saying that if enough fraudulent votes could be found it would overcome Trump’s narrow loss in Arizona, according to three people familiar with the call. Trump also repeatedly asked Vice President Mike Pence to call Ducey and prod him to find the evidence to substantiate Trump’s claims of fraud, according to two of these people.
Part of what makes this so notable is the familiarity of the circumstances. We know, for example, that after Trump lost in Georgia, the then-president also called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, telling the Georgia Republican he wanted someone to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election results, even if that meant overturning the will of the voters.
The then-president added, while pressuring Raffensperger, “[T]here’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
As regular readers know, Raffensperger recorded the call, offering the public the opportunity to hear Trump explore ways to cheat, begging others to participate in his scheme, and even make some subtle threats toward the state’s top elections official. There’s a very real chance that Trump crossed a legal line with this and related efforts to overturn Georgia’s election results, and he might soon be indicted.
But how many others received calls similar to the one Raffensperger recorded?
Ducey, alas, did not capture Trump’s outreach for posterity — or more to the point, for prosecutors — but according to the Post’s account, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the Arizona Republican did hear directly from the outgoing president in late 2020.
In fact, the report added that Ducey told a supporter “he was surprised that special counsel Jack Smith’s team had not inquired about his phone calls with Trump and Pence as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the donor said.”
We don’t yet know whether federal investigators have been in touch with the former governor — Ducey left office earlier this year after serving two terms — but it seems likely that the special counsel’s office saw the Post’s front-page, above-the-fold article.
For his part, Pence appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” yesterday, and said that while he checked in with governors after Election Day 2020, “I don’t remember any pressure.”
Of course, Pence likely wasn’t in a position to know what kind of pressure Trump was applying at the time.
