Donald Trump’s weeks of efforts to pressure the Department of Justice (DOJ) into helping him overturn his election loss are spelled out in a new interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Many of the details have already been reported, including Trump’s repeated calls to top Justice Department officials and the meeting at which he had to be dissuaded from firing Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replacing him with a loyalist bent on throwing out the election results in a series of states. But the report also offers some newer details, and having the evidence assembled in a 394-page document is powerful.
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Trump’s personal effort is highlighted in a succinct timeline of the weeks between William Barr’s resignation as attorney general and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol:
That’s kind of a lot. And, of course, these behind-the-scenes pressure efforts ran parallel to Trump’s very public—and more successful—efforts to convince his supporters that the election had been stolen from him.
In addition to Trump’s actions, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was simultaneously pressuring Rosen to have the Justice Department investigate a series of false and discredited claims about election fraud, including “a theory known as ‘Italygate,’ which was promoted by an ally of the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes.”
At the same time, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the acting assistant attorney general for the civil division, was pressuring Rosen and Donoghue to send out memos urging key state legislatures to overturn the election results in their states. Clark attempted to use Trump’s threat to fire Rosen and replace him with Clark to get Rosen and Donoghue to go along with this plan.
Other key findings include that Trump did, as widely suspected, force the sudden resignation of Byung Jin Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, and bypassed the line of succession for Pak’s job to give it to a Trump loyalist. And Rep. Scott Perry was actively involved in the effort: “Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump, and documents and testimony confirm that he directly communicated with Donoghue about his false Pennsylvania election fraud claims.”
Barr’s resignation in December doesn’t get him off the hook, either: “Prior to the 2020 general election, DOJ’s longstanding policy and practice was to avoid taking overt steps in election fraud investigations until after votes were certified, in order to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election. Then-Attorney General Barr weakened this decades-long policy shortly before and after the 2020 election, including in a November 9, 2020 memo that directed prosecutors not to wait until after certification to investigate allegations of voting irregularities that ‘could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.’ Consistent with this directive and following additional personal involvement by Barr, DOJ took overt steps to investigate false claims of election fraud before certification in one instance detailed to the Committee—and likely others.”
Judiciary Committee Republicans released a competing minority report, which repeatedly points out that Trump didn’t follow through on firing Rosen and Donoghue and “listened to his advisors.” Never mind that it took hours of arguing to convince him not to make good on the worst of his threats and that Trump’s advisers included the guy pushing the Italian military satellites theory of election theft. If what you have is that the former guy didn’t follow all the way through on the pressure he exerted and that he claimed he was concerned with “the U.S. electoral system writ large rather than concerns about his campaign or himself personally” (ha), then you don’t have much.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, speaks at a Trump rally in Iowa this weekend. In case you were wondering where this Republican report on Trump’s election subversion efforts is coming from.
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Trump’s personal effort is highlighted in a succinct timeline of the weeks between William Barr’s resignation as attorney general and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol:
That’s kind of a lot. And, of course, these behind-the-scenes pressure efforts ran parallel to Trump’s very public—and more successful—efforts to convince his supporters that the election had been stolen from him.
In addition to Trump’s actions, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was simultaneously pressuring Rosen to have the Justice Department investigate a series of false and discredited claims about election fraud, including “a theory known as ‘Italygate,’ which was promoted by an ally of the President’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and which held that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and an Italian IT contractor used military satellites to manipulate voting machines and change Trump votes to Biden votes.”
At the same time, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the acting assistant attorney general for the civil division, was pressuring Rosen and Donoghue to send out memos urging key state legislatures to overturn the election results in their states. Clark attempted to use Trump’s threat to fire Rosen and replace him with Clark to get Rosen and Donoghue to go along with this plan.
Other key findings include that Trump did, as widely suspected, force the sudden resignation of Byung Jin Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, and bypassed the line of succession for Pak’s job to give it to a Trump loyalist. And Rep. Scott Perry was actively involved in the effort: “Perry has acknowledged introducing Clark to Trump, and documents and testimony confirm that he directly communicated with Donoghue about his false Pennsylvania election fraud claims.”
Barr’s resignation in December doesn’t get him off the hook, either: “Prior to the 2020 general election, DOJ’s longstanding policy and practice was to avoid taking overt steps in election fraud investigations until after votes were certified, in order to avoid inserting DOJ itself as an issue in the election. Then-Attorney General Barr weakened this decades-long policy shortly before and after the 2020 election, including in a November 9, 2020 memo that directed prosecutors not to wait until after certification to investigate allegations of voting irregularities that ‘could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.’ Consistent with this directive and following additional personal involvement by Barr, DOJ took overt steps to investigate false claims of election fraud before certification in one instance detailed to the Committee—and likely others.”
Judiciary Committee Republicans released a competing minority report, which repeatedly points out that Trump didn’t follow through on firing Rosen and Donoghue and “listened to his advisors.” Never mind that it took hours of arguing to convince him not to make good on the worst of his threats and that Trump’s advisers included the guy pushing the Italian military satellites theory of election theft. If what you have is that the former guy didn’t follow all the way through on the pressure he exerted and that he claimed he was concerned with “the U.S. electoral system writ large rather than concerns about his campaign or himself personally” (ha), then you don’t have much.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, speaks at a Trump rally in Iowa this weekend. In case you were wondering where this Republican report on Trump’s election subversion efforts is coming from.