Don tried to derail Justice
Pushed 9 times for bogus probes, wanted elex labeled ‘corrupt’
A Senate report unveiled damning details as to how former President Trump relentlessly tried to bully the Justice Department into helping him overturn the results of the 2020 election, a push that culminated with the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The report released Thursday depicts an angry Trump threatening to replace his hand-picked acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, with a loyalist who was ready to denounce the vote that President Biden won as “corrupt.”
In one White House meeting recounted for Senate investigators, Rosen described how Trump, in an effort to initiate a department inquiry, showed videos of “somebody delivering a suitcase of ballots.”
“One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election,” Trump berated the nation’s top law enforcement official, the report said.
Trump hoped to replace Rosen with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, a pliant MAGA loyalist who wrote a memo suggesting the Justice Department should declare the election “corrupt” and launch a probe into supposed voter fraud.
Top White House lawyer Pat Cipollone also threatened to quit, calling the proposed shakeup a “murder-suicide pact.”
The mercurial ex-president only backed off his scheme when Rosen and other top prosecutors threatened to resign en masse in protest.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that compiled the report, called the revelations frightening new evidence of just how close Trump came to mounting a de facto coup and retaining power.
“Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will,” Durbin said. “But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Sen. Grassley (R-Iowa) asserted that the report proves Trump did nothing wrong because he wasn’t able to implement his plan.
“The available evidence shows that President Trump didn’t use the Department of Justice (to overturn) the 2020 election,” Grassley said. “Trump listened to his advisers ... and that he followed those recommendations.”
The report said Trump personally tried no fewer than nine times to get the Justice Department to launch bogus probes into supposed fraud, even though former Attorney General Bill Barr already said there was no credible evidence to back up the false claims.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also improperly sought to pressure prosecutors to launch investigations into certified vote counts in swing states that Biden won, the report said.
The new details are likely to fuel the probe of the congressional probe into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. After failing to enlist the Justice Department into his plan to overturn Biden’s win, Trump shifted gears to backing the mass protest on Jan. 6.
Thousands of Trump supporters marched on the Capitol in hopes of physically preventing Congress from certifying the election results. They failed, but only after violent clashes that left five dead.
The Jan. 6 committee was considering hearing from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen to gain insight into how right-wing extremists could use the social media platform to plan and execute the attack on the Capitol.
It has also slapped Meadows and three other Trump loyalists with subpoenas for documents and testimony about Trump’s actions before and on Jan. 6.
But Trump’s lawyers have warned the men to defy the legal summonses, setting up a possible court clash over his claim of executive privilege.