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June 16, 2021, 8:26 am
Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly attempted to pressure the Department of Justice into investigating claims of election fraud that had either already been tossed out by other courts or were far too wild to entertain to begin with, according to emails obtained and released by the House Oversight Committee.
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The pressure began in December when everyone who didn’t fall for the lies and conspiracy theories already knew that Joe Biden had been elected the next President of the United States. Trump was losing court cases left and right trying to overturn the results, but he and his supporters still insisted, with no real evidence of any kind, that he had won. Trump was also in the process of distancing himself from anyone who didn’t entertain his delusions.
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Just an hour before he announced on Twitter that William Barr, who had repeatedly been accused of using his position to benefit the president, would be stepping down as attorney general, Trump had his assistant email Jeffrey Rosen about claims of election fraud in Michigan, despite those claims having already been thrown out in court. Rosen would become the acting attorney general upon Barr’s departure.
There are, of course, more emails of this type to Rosen and other members of the DoJ from Trump’s associates — despite the DoJ historically operating independently from the office of the presidency.
In one particularly notable email, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, even asked Rosen to look into claims that Italian satellite technology interfered with voting machines and purposely changed ballot results.
“Pure insanity,” DOJ official Richard Donoghue wrote after Rosen forwarded him Meadows’ email, which contained a YouTube link to the conspiracy theory.
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Trump even went so far as to have his assistant send both Rosen and Donoghue, along with Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, a draft of a complaint demanding the Supreme Court toss out the votes in six states lost by Trump entirely.
While far more details have been released in recent days, it all comes out to say that Trump’s frantic attempts at getting the Justice Department to interfere in or even overturn the results of the election amounted to more than we previously knew. And he had zero interest in letting claims drop even after cases had been thrown out by the courts—he simply tried to pass the same information on to people he felt had more power to change things to work out in his favor.
What’s more, is that there’s no reason to assume we now have all the information. A recent op-ed in The Washington Post dives into how we could soon find out about even more attempts by Trump and his confidants to stay in power despite the will of the people.
*First Published: June 16, 2021, 8:26 am
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