Also hear from the incoming president of the United States, and then later tonight from the defeated one as both joe biden and Donald Trump Campaign ahead of tomorrows Runoff Elections to determine control of the senate. Thousands are already gathering for the republican rally in the county seat of Whitfield County which currently has the fifth highest Coronavirus Infection rate in the state according to the Atlanta Journal constitution. The virus has killed more than 500 americans today. Bringing the death toll to more than 352,000. And three weeks after the first vaccinations began the cdc says 4. 5 Million People have received the shot. Meanwhile, the president s focus as you can imagine, elsewhere. This afternoon he awarded the president ial medal of freedom, the nations highest civilian honor, by the way to, republican californias devin nunes. Joining me to talk about this, nbc news senior digital White House CorrespondentShannon Pettypiece across from the white house. Nbc news correspondent mike memoli in atlanta where hes covering president elect joe bidens visit and Campaign Stop there later today. Msnbc correspondent Garrett Haake on capitol hill. Shannon, lets start you, if i may. Just minutes ago secretary of state Brad Raffensperger talked with atlanta affiliate wxia tv. What did he have to say about that controversial phone call with President Trump . Yeah, well a few points he looked to make in that interview, of course, were going to hear from him in moments. One, pushing back on criticism for releasing the audio of this call saying that there was no privacy agreement with the president and that the president essentially broke any expectation of privacy when he mischaracterized that call. And if you recall before the audio and the transcript of this call were released, the president put out a tweet saying that the secretary of state was either unable or unwilling to address some of the president s concerns about these conspiracy theories like ballots being kept under tables and dead people voting in mass numbers. And said that the secretary of state had no clue and then after that, this audio was released. We also heard in that interview according to these tweets that have been released so far that the secretary of state plans no criminal investigation into this call, but he said that doesnt necessarily mean that other agencies like the District Attorney of Fulton County couldnt look into a criminal investigation, of course, theres been this allegation that the president was trying to pressure the secretary of state into changing the results of the election as you can hear in some of those audio excerpts. You know, i will add to this a bit of our own reporting from nbc news that the president , the white house, tried to call the georgia secretary of state 18 times and that he finally decided to take the call on this saturday afternoon. The call lasted about an hour, and now, of course, it has generated and spiraled into this back and forth between the president and the secretary of state. So remains to be seen whether we see another response for the president after we hear these remarks in a few minutes. Its also ignited quite a reaction across both parties there on capitol hill. Caveat to our viewers, were waiting for the georgia secretary of state, they put up a poster there from what i can tell, it say s claims and facts. It seems they may be going point by point with some of the president s claims that have been presented and the facts to refute them yet again. Garrett, lets talk about how this is playing out on capitol hill. An investigation that is some is getting some traction today. Were going to be speaking to representative ted liu in a little bit. How is it playing out there . Is there wide support for an investigation on capitol hill . Reporter the short answer is no. Its actually quite divisive. I was at a press conference with joakim jeffries, i asked him about the prospect after another phone call with another leader, in that case the president of ukraine, we ended up going down the road toward impeachment, could this phone call lead to more action by the house . Jeffries was pretty clear, he wants the Democratic Caucus to be moving forward. Focused on the fact that joe biden will be president of the United States in 16 days and to not be essentially looking backwards and fighting every battle with the outgoing Trump Administration. I can tell you, you know, the response to the phone call on the republican side has been about what you would expect. I heard from a number of republican lawmakers who said, look, this is just the way the president talks. Were sort of used to hearing this kind of thing, no big deal. Although, there have been some republicans who called him out for it most notably liz cheney in the house leadership whos become quite the prominent trump critic of late. Also pat toomey, republican senator of pennsylvania, notably retiring at the end of his term in two years who called this kind of the sad last chapter of the president s attempts to overturn this election. So, you know, it is reverberating a bit here in the capitol, but its not clear how much legs this will have in terms of other investigations. Or other action taken by either of these bodies. Garrett, stand by. Mike, could it be that the Biden Justice department, he has yet to name an attorney general, yet one more factor to take into this consideration as he makes that choice. Is it possible that the incoming attorney general and the Justice Department end up investigating this . Is this where they want to go . Well, ayman, as you say, we dont know who joe biden is going to choose yet as his attorney general. Thats an announcement we could get as soon as this week. We do know because biden has been very clear about it what he wants out of his Justice Department. Hes made clear in a departure from what he believes has been the case under donald trump, he wants an independent Justice Department free of political influence from the white house. You heard when i asked the president elect a few weeks ago whether as part of his search for attorney general hes raised an issue of an investigation of his own son. That is something that biden says has not been the case. Its hard to see how he hasnt had a conversation with potential attorneys general about how they would pursue potential investigations of President Trump or his administration officials. Especially given what we have heard reporting from carol lee and myself about the fact that joe biden does not want his administration being consumed by investigations of his predecessor, but as garrett knows well, were already hearing talk from democrats on capitol hill about potentially in these final weeks of his term as president launching an impeachment proceeding, censure, what investigations on capitol hill might look like going forward. You can see we are preparing for reporter as we now hear the secretary of state. All right. Mike, let me just interrupt you really quickly. Were going to cross over to georgia. Gabriel sterling is speaking now at the lectern. Lets listen in to what he has to. 962,000 mailin absentee ballots received. 281,376 that are still outstanding. Im hoping to get the military received and outstanding before the end of this press conference which will hopefully come in on my cell phone. Early vote in personobviously, we smashed a record for turnout on that one. 2 million. Were looking at 3 million votes that have already been cast across georgia. The previous record for a Runoff Election was in 2004. Thats right. Saxby chambliss race, 2. 1 million votes that were cast. That is the previous record and the election in 2018, Runoff Election, we saw just over 1. 5 million. So, obviously, a lot of inter t interest, im sure georgians are tired of tv ads, text messages, voicemails, and mail. So its all going to end very soon. Hopefully. In preparation for the election tomorrow on electionday voting we have 6,963 poll pads. They finished the final loading of their data today before lunch. We had about 21 counties, the last ones to go, most completed over the weekend. There will be a total of 6, sorry, 2,648 polling locations open on election day. We have a couple of them closed due to some shortages and some other covidrelated items but the total we have right now is 2,648. We dont anticipate changes but that always may happen. We have shared those locations with Georgia Power and the emcs in case theres power issues or any other issues that might come up from that. And weve seen a few shortages of poll workers, specifically saw morgan county, theyre going to lose two locations because of that. Now, what weve seen also is a difference in the turnout models depending on Congressional District and county in the state so far. And large part driven by the continuing misinformation and disinformation concerning the value of peoples votes in this state. The secretary wants me to make clear that everybodys vote is going to count. Everybody ses vote did count. I want to make that abundantly clear. If you care about, you know, the values and directions of the nation you want to see, it is your obligation to turn out and vote tomorrow, democrat or republican. However, right now, given the nature of the president s statements and several other people who have been aligned with him previously have literally had a rally saying protest and dont vote, were specifically asking you and telling you, please turn out and vote tomorrow. One of the things specifically ive had to argue with people whom ive known for 20 years, they say, well, we feel like our election was stolen. We feel like our votes dont count. I said, okay, im not acknowledging the election was stolen because it wasnt. Im not acknowledging there was massive voter fraud because there wasnt. If you believe in your heart of hearts that there was, the best thing for you to do is to turn out and vote and make it harder for them to steal. If thats what you genuinely in your heart of hearts believe, turn out and vote. There are people who fought and died and marched and prayed and voted to get the right to vote. Throwing it away because you have some feeling that it may not matter is selfdestructive. Ultimately. And a selffulfilling prophecy in the end. So, everybody who cares about the future of this nation should turn out and vote. Its vitally important. Its absolutely important. And the reason im having to stand here today is because there are people in positions of authority and respect who have said their votes didnt count and its not true. And im going to do it again and im going to go through all this antidisinformation monday. Its whackamole again, its groundhog day again. Im going to talk about things ive talked about repeatedly for two months. Im going to do it again one last time im hoping because at the oebdn end of the day we wan make sure people understand their votes count. Every person, every voice, matters. I know theres people who have fought for that for years about this. Lets start again and, yes, some of this is going to come out of the continuing statements from the president , and some of his supporters. Stay firm. All right. This has been what has been conflated over several different things. We have multiple scanned ballots. We have ruby freeman. We have the leak, they said a water main break which wasnt a water main break. So in order to be fully transparent, one of the things we did, we had a local media organization, justin over here, we went through hours and hours, walked through frame by frame and showed what happened. So lets start. If you go to securevotega. Com, we posted all the videos from state farm for that day that cover the relevant periods. 5 23 a. M. , they walk in and discover what is essentially a pond on the floor where you can see water coming out of the sky. So they say, okay, we cant do our work here this morning. They call in, the state farm people, not Fulton County people which is one of the other things they said. No Fulton County work order to fix the water leak. Guess what, it wasnt in a Fulton County facility, it was in state farm. They were the ones who fixed the leak. A urinal overflowed, they were turned off, guess what, nobody is in state farm because of covid. They turned off those things, went over the uredge of the relf valve and caused a leak. 7 00 in the morning or so, you have essentially the, i dont know what they call it, drying zamboni driving around on the Carpet Cleaning it all up. 8 23, you see a woman bringing in the table in question that has been the point of mr. Giulianis 90second clip. Shes pulling it with one hand and sets it down. Theres nothing underneath it. Okay . Then you can fast forward to later in the day, about 9 45 or so. Everybody there, there are two groups of people there, theres cutters and there are scanners. What happened was the cutters began putting their stuff away because everybody was under the impression they were going to get home. We have discovered this. So they start putting covers over the cutting machines and everything. So then we see also while the monitors and the press are still in the room, they bring out the carriers which are normal absentee ballot carriers. And i will admit when i listened to the audio of the phone call and the president brought that up again and i heard it on radio ad again today, i wanted to scream, well, i did scream at the computer and i screamed in my car at the radio talking about this because this has been thoroughly debunked. They bring out the normally absentee ballot carriers. There are monitors in the room, press in the room. They take the ballots that have been open, put them in carrier trays, put them in there, put them in the boxes, put the lid on. The lid matches the box. You see at one point during the video a woman crawling on the floor putting the numbered seals on them to keep the chain of custody. Approximately 10 25, 10 30, the secretary and our office receivreceiv receives word that Fulton County is shutting down for the night at state farm arena. So as some of you all who were there on election day night, the secretary got a little irritated with this and made his feelings quite known. They said some of us will work into the night, glad to see that fu Fulton County sees the need to knock off for the the evening. Chris harvey, elections director, calls the elections director of Fulton County who was at the other location which was their english Street Warehouse because he was doing electionday activities. Chris calls rick. Rick says, were not shutting down. Chris says, looks like you are. So then you can go back to the videotape and see ralph jones take a phone call at approximately almost 11 00. And you can see his shoulders kind of shrug. He takes the phone call. Hes being told at that point by his boss, rick baron, you need to stay and continue to scan. So, he hangs up the phone, he goes over to boxes. Uts more seals on them because obviously, if you watch the videotape, many of the people that are there have been there since 7 00 in the morning. Its already 11 00 at night. They were all under the impression they were going to get to go home. So you see him spend about 30 seconds going, heck, what am i going to say to these people. He walks back over to the corner of the desk and says i got the word, we got to keep on scanning. So they go back to the boxes, you see them put under the table at the approximately 10 00 hour. There is videotape of this. And this is whats really frustrating. The president s legal team had the entire tape, they watched the entire tape, and from our point of view, intentionally misled the states senate, voters and the people of the United States about this. It was intentional. It was obvious. Anybody watching this knows that. Anyone watching it knows that. Thats why we released the entire tape for people to watch. So, this claim that that was done, so they pull those out and begin to scan. Then the other claim comes from ruby freeman and multiple scanning. One of the things you need to understand is a normal ballot processing if theres a problem with the ballot, what it does is it stops but before that, four or five will get through. They say delete that last batch and rescan it so they scan properly. That is a normal process that is done. Secondarily with that, everybody might be familiar with the fact the president wanted us to do a hand recount, hand retally which we ended up doing under our audit. That audit showed that there was no problems with the machine scanning. If somebody took a stack of ballots and scanned them multiple times, you would have a lot of votes with no corresponding ballots. So lets go over the numbers one more time. Statewide, it was for the sheer number of ballots, they were off by. 1035 . Margin, off by. 0099 . Which shows that the machines scanned properly, counties did a great job of following these batches and doing the hand count properly. Appropriately. With scrutiny and with observers. So, lets put that to bed right now. In one of the other things we did as part of our transparency is we have put all of those tally sheets online for every county so you can go through and look at them all. And its, again, at the securevotega. Com. Lets see, lets go over the numbers of the president s team is claiming. We have a little chart over here. Theyre claiming over 2,056 felons have voted. Our research, we have better data because were directly tied to the State Government on this, department of corrections and the other department which i cant remember what its called right now. Basically tracks when people are on probation. There we go. We know exactly how many people voted for this. We have 74 potential peopl