Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election
Source: Washington Post
National Security
Senate report gives new details of Trump efforts to use Justice Dept. to overturn election
By Devlin Barrett
Today at 8:45 a.m. EDT
A Senate report on President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election offers new details about an Oval Office confrontation between Trump and the Justice Department, revealing the extent to which government lawyers threatened to resign en masse if the president removed his attorney general.
The interim report by the Senate Judiciary Committee was issued Thursday. While Republicans on the panel offered their counter-findings arguing that Trump did not subvert the justice system to remain in power, the majority report by the Democrats offers the most detailed account to date of the struggle inside the administration’s final, desperate days. (1)(2)
On Jan. 3, then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a handful of other administration officials met in the Oval Office for what all expected to be a final confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud.
[Read the report: ‘Subverting Justice: How the former president and his allies pressured DOJ to overturn the 2020 election’]
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
According to testimony Rosen gave to the committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it.
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By Devlin Barrett
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for National Reporting, for coverage of Russian interference in the U.S. election. Twitter https://twitter.com/DevlinBarrett
(1) https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
(2) https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/in_their_own_words_a_factual_summary_of_testimony_from_senior_justice_department_officials_relating_to_events_from_december_14_2020_to_january_3_2021.pdf
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/durbin-report-trump-pressure-justice/2021/10/07/b51712d4-2769-11ec-8d53-67cfb452aa60_story.html
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