Whitehouse admitted that Trump may not have been the mastermind behind the DOJ’s scheme to overthrow the election

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Former President Donald Trump may not be the person “pulling the strings” behind a plan that relies on replacing the top Justice Department official with a loyalist willing to take a more aggressive approach to challenge election results in 2020, a Democratic Senate investigator admitted on Sunday.

Si Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appeared at NBC News ’Meet the Press to discuss the interim report released last week by his panel on the DOJ’s pressure campaign.

Trump is said to have favored replacing Jeffrey Rosen, his attorney general, with Jeffrey Clark, another DOJ official who made the proposal to interfere with the certification process in Georgia and raised doubts about election results in other states. state. The former president decided not to fire Rosen after he was told at the first January meeting at the Oval Office that top Justice Department officials and White House counsel Pat Cipollone would resign if the plan followed, according to the 394-page report from the Senate Judiciary Committee, based on the testimony of former officials and documents.

Whitehouse told host Chuck Todd that investigators have “a complete picture of the extent to which Trump is personally involved in it,” and he said Trump’s overtures to Georgia officials about the results in elections are the focus of a separate investigation that looks at whether the president and his allies initially violated state laws.

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But the Rhode Island Democrat said the question of who exactly is the mastermind of the DOJ’s “scheme” remains unclear and he pondered how it was funded.

“What we don’t know is who’s really behind it,” Whitehouse said. “The text of the translation and the English body of the witnesses indicate that they do not have much care for this man Jeffrey Clark, who is nominally going to be the new Attorney general. They doubt his qualifications to even have that role. that. “

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“So, it’s a possibility, I think, that he saw the moment and took it, but it’s an equally real possibility that he was a charcoal in a bigger machine and we have a lot of work to do to find out. how that The machine ran during this time, who was behind it, where the money came from, and what was going on, ”he added.

Todd hit this point, asking, “And you think it’s someone other than Donald Trump? I mean you know, when I hear that, you’re saying you believe there’s someone else involved, someone else pulling the strings. “Who could be that but Donald Trump?”

Whitehouse said Senate investigators, who are working with the House Jan. 6 Selection Committee, do not yet have a clear view on that topic.

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“We don’t know yet, but, you know, this guy jumped into a dark business. So, he was taken care of, Jeffrey Clark. There’s a lot of activity around it with members of Congress. There’s just a lot left to learn,” he added. .

Clark, who headed the civil division division of the Department of Justice during the Trump administration, was hired by the New Civil Liberties Alliance as head of litigation and director of strategy at the civil rights group.

He refused to sit down for a voluntary interview, the Senate Judiciary Committee report said. Dick Durbin, chairman of the panel, asked the DC Bar to open an investigation into Clark.

A GOP rebuttal report insists on available evidence showing that Trump followed the advice and recommendations of his senior advisers and did not use the Justice Department to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

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Tags: News, Congress, Sheldon Whitehouse, Donald Trump, Department of Justice

Original Author: Daniel Chaitin

Original Location: Whitehouse admits Trump may not be the mastermind behind the DOJ’s scheme to overturn the election

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