Revelations demand action
Every day seems to bring extraordinary new revelations about Donald Trump’s efforts to enlist the Justice Department in his scheme to subvert the 2020 election. The drumbeat of disclosures is leaving everyone shocked and appalled.
Here’s another thought: Let’s use these revelations to build the case for reforms that could help prevent such misdeeds from happening again, or at least make them a lot harder to get away with.
Such reforms are already there on the table. During the past Congress, House Democrats crafted the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which would create new mechanisms of transparency into precisely what’s at issue here: presidential efforts to manipulate Justice Department officials toward illicit or corrupt political ends.
The latest revelation from the Post is that Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general during Trump’s final days, has privately testified to a Senate committee that Trump applied “persistent” pressure on the department to publicly discredit his 2020 loss.
The goal was apparently to create a pretext for subverting the count of presidential electors in Congress, as Trump pressured Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to do. We’ve also learned that another department official — Jeffrey Clark, acting head of its civil division — drafted a letter to Georgia officials casting doubt on the results and suggesting state lawmakers could send rogue electors.
That was done during direct collaboration with Trump. What’s more, according to contemporaneous notes, Trump urged Rosen and other officials to “just say the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me.”
This is exactly the sort of presidential communication with the Justice Department that the Protecting Our Democracy Act would make more transparent. The bill would require the attorney general to maintain a log of communications between the executive branch and department officials, and report them biannually to the department inspector general, who would apprise Congress of “inappropriate” contact.
The act “would provide transparency and accountability for White House efforts to contact law enforcement,” Daniel Weiner, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There has to be some guardrail that’s codified around this.” Weiner noted that the bill could be tweaked to require disclosures more frequently than twice a year.
Right now, there’s a mad scramble underway, many months after the dirty deeds were done, to reconstruct what really happened. But if the inspector general were apprised frequently of such contacts, and the inspector general (who is independent) could make an immediate judgment of inappropriate contact, Congress could quickly be notified and provided with concrete documentation.
The Protecting Our Democracy Act would also beef up congressional subpoena power, expedite battles over subpoenas through the courts and expand oversight of the pardon power, among many other things. Those are all areas where Trumpian abuses flourished.
The reforms geared at manipulation of the Justice Department could make a difference in another way. By codifying a stricter oversight regime, it could restore the norm of respecting the independence of law enforcement so future presidents are not prone to abuse it.
It’s sometimes suggested that calls for rebuilding norms are fruitless; only concrete legal and political reforms will do. This is a case where the two might reinforce each other. The act, Weiner told me, “sets forth a very clear marker” for future presidents to follow and respect, which is vital, since “you never know who’s going to come later.”
The Protecting Our Democracy Act’s chief sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is expected to reintroduce it this fall. If it passes the House, Senate Republicans will probably filibuster it, claiming that Democrats are still obsessing over Trump.
But this isn’t about Trump. It’s about patching up the big, gaping holes that his misdeeds exposed — just as epic Watergate corruption exposed many other holes that led to major reforms decades ago — so that the legacy of Trump’s corruption is a better system going forward. Democrats should stand up for this ideal, and try to make it happen.