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Democrats leaned on a quote falsely attributed to former President Donald Trump to paint him as pushing for election officials to manufacture evidence of election fraud during Senate impeachment proceedings in February.
A Washington Post story that has since been corrected claimed that Trump told Georgia elections investigator Frances Watson to "find the fraud" in the state, which he lost narrowly to Joe Biden, and that she would be a "national hero" if she did.
Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., repeated the now-corrected quotes while encouraging senators to convict Trump in the Senate impeachment trial on Feb. 10.
"Trump urged him, 'Find the fraud,' and claimed the official would be a national hero if he did. Let’s call this what it is. He was asking the official to say there was evidence of fraud when there wasn’t any," Dean said, referring to Watson as a "he" when she should have said "she."
President Donald Trump speaks in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, April 9, 2018, at the start of a meeting with military leaders. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
In addition, the Georgia secretary of state's office launched an investigation into Trump's phone calls to state election officials before the second attempt to impeach him in February, ABC7 reported.
However, a newly emerged recording of the Dec. 23 call found Trump didn't use those words. Instead, Trump said she would be "praised" when the "right answer comes out" and encouraged her to closely examine mail-in ballots in Fulton County, the heavily blue and most populated county in the state.
The Post published a lengthy correction to its story: "Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to 'find the fraud' or say she would be 'a national hero' if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find 'dishonesty' there. He also told her that she had 'the most important job in the country right now.' A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump."
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CNN also reported on the call citing an unnamed source and waited until Monday afternoon to correct its story, after initially stating Trump said "national hero" and "find the fraud" in its opening paragraph.
While news outlets often cite sources who paraphrase conversations they participated in or overheard, using quotes indicates to the reader a subject said those exact words.
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Fox News' David Rutz contributed to this report.
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