Documents: Trump urged DOJ to declare election corrupt

WASHINGTON >> Former President Donald Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt, even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times. Also on Friday, the Justice Department ruled that the Trea

sury Department must turn over Trump’s tax returns to congressional investigators.

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call Dec. 27 in which Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey Rosen, and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Donoghue wrote in summarizing Trump’s response.

Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Trump; and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., whom Trump praised for getting to the “bottom of things.”

The House Ways and Means Committee had requested Trump’s tax returns for the years immediately before he became president as part of its review of the IRS’ presidential audit program. The Trump administration stymied the request, and the committee sued to obtain the documents.

That review is a valid reason for the request, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said in an opinion. “The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has invoked sufficient reasons for requesting the former president’s tax information,” the opinion said. “Treasury must furnish the information to the committee.”

The Justice Department provided acting AG Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.

Typically, the department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private discussions between a president and his Cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.

But handing over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also told Rosen, Donoghue and other former officials this week that they could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary committees.

The department reasoned that congressional investigators were examining potential wrongdoing by a sitting president, an extraordinary circumstance, according to letters sent to the former officials. Because executive privilege is meant to benefit the country rather than the president as an individual, invoking it over Trump’s efforts to push his personal agenda would be inappropriate, the department concluded.

“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement.

Trump’s conversation with Rosen and Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus on overturning the election results. At one point, Trump claimed voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted elections.” Donoghue pushed back.

“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Donoghue said, adding that the department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” and had not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations, but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Trump, according to the notes.

The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063%, not the 68% that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it found no evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Georgia, according to the notes.

Trump, undeterred, brushed off the department’s findings. “Ok fine — but what about the others?” Donoghue wrote in his notes describing the president’s remarks.

Trump castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the FBI.” He said that “people are angry — blaming DOJ for inaction.”

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Trump said, according to the document.