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Documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee detail President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure the Justice Department to pursue his unfounded allegations of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and help reverse Joe Biden’s victory.
The emails illustrate behind-the-scenes efforts by the Trump White House to pressure federal officials while simultaneously pushing the same false allegations on Twitter. The letters were sent from mid-December to early January and posted by House Oversight and Government Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney, DN.Y.
Among the efforts was to pressure the Justice Department to intervene in the lawsuits pursued by the Trump campaign and its supporters to get the Supreme Court to overturn the findings.
At the end of December, the White House aide sent an email to then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other senior Justice Department officials with a draft legal memo that the president wanted to take to the Supreme Court. Kurt Olsen, Trump’s special counsel, also called department officials and asked the federal agency to file the memo.
The 54-page brief called for the Supreme Court to declare that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada ran the 2020 presidential election in violation of the Voters Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming that states changed election rules without legislation. Action. All six were swing states that Trump lost.
“These unconstitutional changes allowed electoral irregularities to occur in various forms,” the complaint said, and called on the Supreme Court to allow special elections to be held in those states to appoint new presidential electors.
Trump’s public efforts to nullify the election were highly unusual, but had the Department of Justice intervened on his behalf, it could have been seen as an extraordinary use of presidential powers to overturn the will of voters.
The letters are also full of conspiracy theories, and Oversight Committee staff cited at least five instances when Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff, inquired about rumors that were circulating online at the time but that there was no supporting evidence for them. .
For example, Meadows emailed Rosen with a translated document from someone in Italy who claimed without evidence that he had “direct knowledge” of a plot that involved Italians altering election results and then uploading it to “military satellites.”
The lobbying campaign reached its climax on January 1, just five days before the Capitol riots and Congress’ confirmation of approved electors. That day, Meadows emailed Justice Department leaders about Italy’s conspiracy and complaints in Georgia and New Mexico, a state Trump lost by more than 10 points.
“Pure insanity,” Richard Donneau, who was the acting deputy attorney general, wrote to Rosen in response to Meadows’ latest email promoting this theory.
Meadows’ email was linked to a YouTube video showing Brad Johnson – a retired CIA official who LinkedIn says is now providing commentary on the pro-Trump far-right One America News Network – as making unsubstantiated allegations of Italian wrongdoing.
In response to Donoghue, Rosen wrote: “Yes.”
“Following this letter, I was asked to interview the FBI with Brad Johnson, and I replied that Johnson could call or enter the FBI office in Washington with any evidence he claims to have,” Rosen continued. “On a follow-up call, I learned that Johnson was working with Rudy Giuliani, who considered my comments an ‘insult.’ When asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused and said I would not give any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and I reiterated that I I’m not going to talk to Giuliani about any of this.”
It was not clear if the call Rosen mentioned was with Meadows.
In response to another New Year’s Day letter from Meadows to lobby for an investigation of ballot papers in Fulton County, Georgia, Rosen wrote to Donoghue, “Can you believe this? I will not respond to the letter below.”
“It’s better than before,” Donoghue said, referring to Italy’s joint Meadows plot, “but that doesn’t mean much.”
The documents begin with correspondence on December 14, the day states ratified the Electoral College vote in the 2020 election and sealed Trump’s defeat.
The Trump aide sent Rosen an email with the subject line “From POTUS” and the accompanying material that listed “talking points” about “covering up voting crimes” in Michigan, the state Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes.
About an hour after the email was sent, Trump announced that Attorney General William Barr would be stepping down and Rosen would take over as acting attorney general.
Right after midnight the next day, Trump tweeted: “This is BIG news. Dominion voting machines are a disaster across the country. A landslide election result has been altered…” It is a claim that Trump has made repeatedly during his efforts to nullify the election, but no evidence has been provided Absolutely to prove it.
Emails from the end of December and early January showed that White House officials, including Meadows, directed then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to move forward with election fraud lawsuits by communicating with the U.S. Attorney in Georgia, Byung. J Buck. NBC News previously reported that Trump was considering firing Rosen at the time and replacing him with Clark.
In the end, Trump was unsuccessful in getting the Department of Justice to take legal action to overturn the presidential results. A few days after Biden’s inauguration, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced that he would investigate whether any current or former officials had engaged in an “improper attempt to have the Department of Justice seek to alter the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
Maloney said Tuesday that she has asked Meadows and former Justice Department officials involved in the lobbying campaign to appear before the committee for written interviews.
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