The new details are bringing Trump’s Justice Dept. scheme into sharper focus

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On the surface, it has been obvious for months that Donald Trump wanted to hold illegal power in the wake of his election defeat, but the specific nature of his plan has always seemed bleak. What was it, exactly, that the former president thought would happen? What is the plan? Who will implement it and how?

In the last week or so, the role of the Department of Justice in the anti -election scheme has become a sharper focus in ways that have not yet fully harmed Americans. We learned last week, for example, that on Dec. 27 Trump privately urged the top two Justice Department officials at the time to lie about the 2020 presidential election and wrongly say it was bad.

“Just say the election is broken [and] leave the rest to me ”and to Republican members of Congress, the former president told Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, and his deputy, Richard Donoghue.

A day later, on December 28, when Jeffrey Clark – at the time, the acting head of the Department of Justice’s civil division – sketched a map for Georgia Republicans to follow where they could try overthrow the will of the state voters. By some accounts, not just Georgia: The Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), A member of the House Oversight Committee, told the show last week that Clark had prepared draft materials for the six states that the result of the Republican White House wanted to reverse.

As MSNBC Chris Hayes explained on his show last week, “For the first time in the development of this whole story through months of reporting and sort of patches of information, clearly, there’s a actually, will know plan to overthrow the election. An actual strategy to get Donald Trump declared the election winner, not just throwing at the wall and tweeting easily and easily removed farkakteh lawsuits. “

As amazing as these revelations are – I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to see it as one of the most important scandals in U.S. political history – there’s no reason to believe that the flow of new information will stop. NBC News reported yesterday:

The Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue in its investigation into whether former President Donald Trump tried to enlist the help of the Justice Department in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. A spokesman for the committee confirmed it conducted a closed-door interview with Donoghue on Friday and a seven-hour interview with Rosen on Saturday.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) Told CNN yesterday morning that Rosen voluntarily testified, and the pressure Trump put on the former acting attorney general after the election was “true, very true – and it is very certain. “

The New York Times also reported over the weekend that Rosen told the Department of Justice inspector general and congressional investigators that Clark tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results.

The same article noted that, according to the former acting attorney general, Clark admitted that he was meeting with Trump privately amid his efforts to help the former president cling to power he didn’t get. According to the Times, Rosen also described instances where Clark insisted Justice Department officials “made statements about the election that they found to be untrue.”

Although I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere, CNN ran a related piece over the weekend, which said Clark told senior Justice Department officials “that he knew the sensitive information indicated that the Chinese intelligence uses special types of thermometers to change the results on the machines. tallying votes. “

The CNN report referred to an apparent email in which Clark claimed that “the hackers had evidence (in the public domain) that a Dominion machine accessed the Internet via a smart thermostat with a net connection path back to China. ” The Republican lawyer suggested that the Director of the National Intelligence office “may” have classified the evidence to prove the bizarre theory.

Clearly, we now know that radical tactics and extremist partisans have failed. But the fact that such a scheme was censored at first is astonishing – it looks as horrible as an attempted coup – and it’s worth appreciating the fact that if there’s a Republican majority in Congress today, there’s no investigation into the scandal.

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