Trump wanted official to support fraud allegations
WASHINGTON » An hour before Donald Trump announced in December that William Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.
Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Trump’s personal lawyers.
Another email from Trump to Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.
The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Trump to speak with him.
The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Trump pressured Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results.
They are also the latest example of Trump’s frenzied drive to subvert the election results in the final weeks of his presidency, including ratcheting up pressure on the Justice Department.
And they show that Trump flouted an established anticorruption norm that the Justice Department acts independently of the White House on criminal investigations or law enforcement actions, a gap that steadily eroded during Trump’s term.
The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, asking Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.
Much of the correspondence also occurred during a tense week within the Justice Department, when Rosen and his top deputies realized that one of their peers had plotted with Trump to oust Rosen and then try to use federal law enforcement to force Georgia to overturn its election results. Trump nearly replaced Rosen with that colleague, Jeffrey Clark, then the acting head of the civil division.
Rosen made clear to his top deputy in one message that he would have nothing to do with the Italy conspiracy theory, arrange a meeting between the FBI and one of the proponents of the conspiracy, Brad Johnson, or speak about it with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
“I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as an ‘insult,’ ” Rosen wrote in the email. “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses.’ ”
Rosen declined to comment. A spokesman for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.
The 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 Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.
Maloney, whose committee is looking into the events leading up to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd protesting the election results, including Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department, said she has asked former Trump administration officials to sit for interviews, including Meadows, Clark and others.