Documents show how Trump tried to overturn election
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Documents released by a US congressional panel on Tuesday revealed new details of how then-president Donald Trump tried to mobilize the Justice Department last year to join his failed effort to overturn his election defeat based on his false claims of voting fraud.
The House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee, which sought the records, outlined a series of overtures made by the Republican former president, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and an outside private attorney, Kurt Olsen, pushing the department to act on Trump’s claims.
The department ultimately did not join the effort and numerous courts rejected lawsuits seeking to overturn election results in various states.
Congress also is investigating the deadly January 6 assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters trying to stop the formal certification of Democratic President Joe Biden’s election victory.
“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat.
These overtures were separate from the revelations that the Trump-era Justice Department secretly sought the phone records of at least two Democratic lawmakers, a move that led Biden’s Attorney-General Merrick Garland on Monday to vow to strengthen policies aiming to protect the department from political influence.
The department under outgoing Attorney-General William Barr, who left his post on December 23, and his short-term replacement Jeffrey Rosen decided not to act on the false claims of voting fraud.
The documents released by the committee showed that Trump pressured Rosen when he was deputy attorney-general to have the Justice Department take up the election fraud claims. Trump, through an assistant, sent Rosen a December 14 email with documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan – a debunked allegation that a federal judge had already rejected.
Two weeks later, on December 29, Trump’s White House assistant emailed Rosen, who by then was the acting attorney-general, and other Justice Department lawyers a draft legal brief that they were urged to file at the US Supreme Court.
The department never filed the brief. Emails released by the House committee showed that Olsen, a Maryland lawyer involved in writing Trump’s draft brief, repeatedly tried to meet with Rosen but was unsuccessful.
The draft brief backed by Trump argued that changes made by the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania to voting procedures amid the COVID19 pandemic to expand mail-in voting were unlawful.
Similar arguments were made in a lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney-general of Texas and a Trump ally. The US Supreme Court rejected that long-shot lawsuit in December.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The document release comes ahead of the House Oversight committee’s hearing with FBI director Christopher Wray and General Charles Flynn, brother of former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who has also voiced Trump’s election conspiracy theories.