Trump called an Arizona GOP leader to persuade him to change election results. He sent the calls directly to voicemail.

• Trump directly called a GOP leader in Arizona twice while he was trying to overturn the election.
• Clint Hickman, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors sent him to voicemail.
• “I told people, ‘Please don’t have the president call me,'” he told The New York Times.
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Former President Donald Trump called the GOP chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, Clint Hickman, twice during the time he was trying to overturn the results of the election, The New York Times reported.

Hickman told the Times he had Trump’s calls go straight to voicemail.

“I told people, ‘Please don’t have the president call me,'” he said.

The calls were made in late December and early January, he told the Times. The first call came on New Year’s Eve with a voicemail from the White House switchboard noting that Trump wanted to speak with him. The next call came four days later and was also sent to voicemail.

Hickman said at that point he had already read a transcript of Trump’s call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, where Trump asked him to ‘find’ votes to overturn Biden’s statewide win, and the county was already in litigation over the election results.

“I had seen what occurred in Georgia and I was like, ‘I want no part of this madness and the only way I enter into this is I call the president back,'” Mr. Hickman said.

Read more: Michigan’s Democrats in Congress face an ethics complaint after hanging with Biden and voting from afar

For months following the election, Trump and his allies waged lawsuits all across the country to try and reverse President Joe Biden’s win.

In a close race, Biden won Arizona but Hickman said the state Republican Party chairwoman and Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani were pressuring him to investigate fraud in his county’s election. Biden won in Maricopa county.

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Arizona Republic showed records of phone calls to Hickman from Trump and Giuliani.

Arizona’s State Senate called for an audit of all 2.1 million votes cast in the county, which is still underway.

Trump and his allies waged dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits trying to overturn the election and have repeatedly made false claims he would be reinstated.