Georgia Deputy Secretary of State was Washington Post’s source for fake Trump ‘find the fraud’ quotes

Fuchs, an appointee of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had told the Washington Post that Trump demanded Georgia's chief investigator of the Secretary of State Frances Watson to "find the fraud," arguing that it would make him "a national hero."

The report was based on a statement from "an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.

The original story, based on the fabricated quotes, suggested that Trump's actions may constitute "obstruction of justice or other criminal violations" under the consideration that Trump was essentially instructing Raffensperger to manufacture false claims of election fraud to change the election outcome in Georgia.

The story would later be cited by House Democrats during Trump's second impeachment as evidence against the President.

More than two months after the revelation, which had become one of the top news stories of January, it was discovered that the allegations leveled against Trump were false. An audio recording of the phone call was discovered on the computer of the chief investigator, raising further questions regarding why the recording was saved, why it was not released earlier, and how it was found.

As it turns out, Trump had never demanded that Watson "find the fraud," nor did he promise that he would become "a national hero." Instead, Trump suggested that if Watson investigated claims of election fraud, then she would find "dishonesty." Trump also said that Watson had "the most important job in the country right now."

The difference between the actual phone call and what was reported by the Washington Post is notable. Rather than implying that Watson should invent false claims of fraud, Trump only asked that she continue to search for fraud which the President genuinely believed to be real.

The Post issued a correction to the story, falsely claiming that the quotes were "misattributed to Trump" when, in fact, they were falsified entirely. Long before the Post issued its correction, however, the story was picked up by other mainstream media outlets who claimed to have "corroborated" or "confirmed" the story.

American-Brazilian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has practiced in the field for decades, explained how such false claims could be "corroborated" by other sources.

"When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have 'independently corroborated' a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it," wrote Greenwald.

"What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN [for example] the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story. And just as CNN did—repeated what they were told without independently investigating it, because they knew any anti-Trump story would please their partisan audience."

The former President released a statement on Monday thanking the Post for the correction while accusing the media as a whole of bias against him, a recurrent theme in Trump's public statements.

"You will notice that establishment media errors, omissions, mistakes, and outright lies always slant one way—against me and against Republicans. Meanwhile, stories that hurt Democrats or undermine their narratives are buried, ignored, or delayed until they can do the least harm—for example, after an election is over," Trump said.

"This latest media travesty underscores that legacy media outlets should be regarded as political entities—not journalistic enterprises. In any event, I thank the Washington Post for the correction."