Was the Trump-Raffensperger Call Recording Legal Under Georgia Law?

On January 2, 2021, President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to "find" enough votes to overturn Trump's Georgia loss. The call was recorded and made public the next day. Under Georgia's one-party consent law, the recording was legal if a participant made it.

Information last verified on July 13, 2026. We update this page as the related Fulton County court case develops.

Scope: This article covers whether Georgia law made it legal to record the January 2, 2021 call, and the current status of the related Fulton County criminal case. It does not address the separate federal investigation into 2020 election matters or any state's law other than Georgia's. This is general legal information, not legal advice.

What Happened on the Call

On January 2, 2021, President Trump, who was contesting his loss in Georgia, spoke by phone for about an hour with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump told Raffensperger he wanted to "find" 11,780 votes, one more than his certified margin of defeat, and made a series of election-fraud claims that Georgia and federal election officials had not substantiated.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and several attorneys, including Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Hilbert, joined the call on Trump's side. Raffensperger was joined by the secretary of state's office general counsel, Ryan Germany, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs. The Washington Post published a transcript and audio of the call on January 3, 2021, reporting that it had obtained the recording.

Trump referenced the call in a social media post the following morning, and Raffensperger responded publicly, saying that what Trump was describing was not accurate. Both exchanges were reported alongside the call's release; a full list of the disputed claims and why officials rejected them is covered in our rundown of 2020 election voter-fraud claims.

Was the Call Recording Legal Under Georgia Law

Recording the call was legal under Georgia law if it was made by a participant, or by a third party with a participant's consent. Georgia is a one-party consent state for both phone calls and in-person conversations under O.C.G.A. § 16-11-66(a).

Georgia's One-Party Consent Rule

O.C.G.A. § 16-11-66(a) allows a person who is a party to a phone call, or who has the consent of at least one party, to record it without telling or getting permission from anyone else on the line. That makes the recording of the Trump-Raffensperger call legal if it was made by Trump, by Raffensperger, by anyone else who was on the call, or by a third party acting with permission from one of them.

Trump reportedly took the call from the White House in Washington, D.C., while Raffensperger's office was in Georgia. Both are one-party consent jurisdictions (D.C. Code § 23-542 and O.C.G.A. § 16-11-66(a)), so the fact that the call crossed state lines does not change the analysis.

When the Recording Would Have Been Illegal

The recording would have violated Georgia law only if someone who was not a party to the call, and who did not have consent from at least one participant, secretly intercepted it under O.C.G.A. § 16-11-62. If that had happened, O.C.G.A. § 16-11-67 generally would have made the recording inadmissible in a Georgia court, with a narrow exception allowing its use to prosecute the interception itself.

No public reporting has identified a non-consenting third party as the source of this recording. Its origin is consistent with either side of the call, rather than an outside wiretap.

Who Published the Recording

The Washington Post reported on January 3, 2021 that it had obtained audio and a transcript of the call without identifying who supplied it. Raffensperger and his office did not dispute that the call took place and publicly stood behind the account reflected in the recording.

The Call's Role in the Fulton County Election-Interference Case

The January 2 call was one of the specific acts charged in Fulton County's August 2023 racketeering indictment of Trump and 18 others. District Attorney Fani Willis was later disqualified from the case, and on November 26, 2025 the prosecutor who took over dropped all remaining charges, ending the case without a trial.

On August 14, 2023, a Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants on one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, O.C.G.A. § 16-14-4, along with 40 additional counts tied to 161 alleged acts in furtherance of a scheme to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results (Fulton County Criminal Indictment, Case No. 23SC188947). Count 28 of the indictment charged Trump and Meadows with soliciting Raffensperger to violate his oath of office during the January 2 call.

Four of the original 19 defendants resolved their cases with guilty pleas in October 2023, before the case reached trial. Scott Hall, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Jenna Ellis each pleaded guilty to reduced charges in exchange for probation and, for most of them, a requirement to testify truthfully in later proceedings (NPR, Oct. 19, 2023). Those pleas were not affected by the case's later dismissal.

The case against Trump and the remaining defendants never reached trial. On December 19, 2024, the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis and her office from the prosecution, citing "the appearance of impropriety" arising from her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she had hired to lead the case. Willis appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which declined to review the disqualification on September 16, 2025, leaving the Court of Appeals' ruling in place.

Because Willis and her office could no longer prosecute the case, the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia assigned its executive director, Peter Skandalakis, to decide whether to continue it. Skandalakis took over as prosecutor in November 2025, and on November 26, 2025 he filed an entry of nolle prosequi dropping all remaining charges against Trump and the other remaining defendants. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee granted the motion the same day, dismissing the case in its entirety.

In his filing, Skandalakis wrote that pursuing the case for what he estimated could be another five to ten years did not serve the citizens of Georgia, and that it was not realistic to bring a sitting president to trial while he held office. The dismissal ended the state prosecution without a trial and without a court ruling on whether the underlying racketeering allegations, including the allegation tied to the Raffensperger call, were proven. It does not change the recording-law analysis above, which concerns only whether making the recording itself was lawful.

Analysis: Two Separate Legal Questions

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

Whether the recording was legal and what happened to the criminal case are separate questions, and it is easy to conflate them. Georgia's one-party consent rule is narrow and settled: it asks who made the recording, not what was said on it or what legal consequences followed from it. That question was answerable from the beginning. The recording was almost certainly lawful under O.C.G.A. § 16-11-66(a) regardless of which side of the call produced it, because both Trump and Raffensperger were parties to their own conversation.

The case's dismissal is a later, separate development driven by a disqualification dispute and a prosecutor's discretion, not by any finding about the call itself. A nolle prosequi ends a prosecution without resolving the truth of the underlying allegations, so the November 2025 dismissal should not be read as a ruling on what happened during the call or on whether it amounted to solicitation of election fraud. It also does not disturb the Second Circuit-style appellate record in Trump's other litigation, because this was a distinct state case with its own docket. Readers following this story should keep the settled recording-law question separate from the closed, but merits-unresolved, Fulton County case.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers Georgia's recording-consent law as applied to a specific, widely reported 2021 phone call, and the status of the related Fulton County criminal case as verified on July 13, 2026. Court cases can change quickly. Consult a lawyer licensed in Georgia for advice about a specific situation.