Kamala Harris blasts Trump's call with Georgia officials as 'bold abuse of power'

Kamala Harris has branded Donald Trump's leaked call with Georgia election officials as a "bold abuse of power."

At a drive-thru rally in Savannah in Georgia, on Sunday (January 3), the Vice President-elect addressed the crowd while campaigning for Democratic Senate runoff candidates.

Per CNN, Harris told the crowd:

"Have you all heard about that recorded conversation? Well, it was, yes, certainly, the voice of desperation, most certainly that, and it was a bald, bald-faced, bold abuse of power by the President of the United States. [sic]"

Harris also criticized Trump's repeated, and unverified, allegations of voter fraud from the Democrats, adding:

"Look at the most recent history, which is that after you elected, you turned Georgia blue, you elected Joe Biden President of the United States, you elected the first black woman in the history of our country to be the Vice President of the United States.

"And [Republicans] have the gall to suggest you didn't know what you were doing, you must have gone about it in a way that was illegitimate."

Trump has hit headlines today after The Washington Post obtained and released a recording of a phone call in which the outgoing president can be heard speaking to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

In the January 2 phone call, Trump asks Raffensperger to "find" votes in the state of Georgia to help overturn the election in order to defeat Joe Biden.

While falsely insisting that he had won the state of Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, Trump can be heard espousing a number of unfounded claims, and at one point tells Raffensperger that he could be held criminally liable if he refused to report the truth.

Trump goes on to make unverified claims that these ballots had been shredded by the Biden campaign and that voting machinery was removed from Fulton County.

At one point in the recording, Trump states:

"All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.

"The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry, and there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated.

"You know what they did and you're not reporting it. That's a criminal offence. You can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer."

Meanwhile, per BBC News, Raffensperger replied: "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.

"You have people who submit information and we have our people that submit information, and then it comes before the court and the court has to make a determination. We have to stand by our numbers, we believe our numbers are right."

Addressing the leaked recording in a tweet made to his 88.5 million followers made on January 3, Trump later wrote:

"I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the 'ballots under table' scam, ballot destruction, out of state 'voters', dead voters, and more. He has no clue! [sic]"

However, Raffensperger himself defiantly retweeted Trump, writing in reply: "Respectfully, President Trump: What you're saying is not true. The truth will come out."

Per Sky News, Joe Biden's senior adviser Bob Bauer has also commented on the leaked recording stating: "We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state's lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.

"It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump's assault on American democracy."