The Majority Report on the President’s Efforts to Pressure DOJ to Overturn the Election
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary just released an interim report on Trump’s efforts to use the Department of Justice to subvert the last election. It was based on an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee accompanied by the documents attached to the report and resulting from interviews with the top leadership of the Department of Justice. There is much more to be done, particularly about the planning for, the failure of intelligence and the slow response to the insurrection of January 6.
The electoral interference started over the summer of 2020 with Trump saying that if he did not win the election was rigged and claiming that vote by mail would be the mechanism for election fraud benefitting Democrats. There are prohibitions against using DOJ for partisan purposes during elections. Nevertheless, at Trump’s public urging, Attorney General Barr asked the US Attorneys all over the nation to be on the lookout for election fraud and to act immediately if they found any. On December 1, Attorney General Barr announced that the DOJ had found no evidence of election fraud that would have overturned Biden’s victory. Two weeks later after listening to Trump’s unabated rage, Barr announced his resignation effective December 23, 2020.
After Barr’s resignation was public, Trump and his team called the two top remaining DOJ leaders (Rosen and Donoghue) to a meeting at the White House to ask them to pursue election fraud investigations in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, setting off a frantic three weeks from the President asking DOJ to overturn the election results, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. He followed up with several more calls in the next week asserting there was election fraud in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Immediately after Christmas, he called again telling acting Attorney General Rosen and his chief Deputy Richard Donoghue to investigate election fraud in Georgia and Pennsylvania. He continued to escalate the pressure on DOJ until a stand-off at the OK corral (White House) on January 3, 2021 to fire them unless they wrote a letter to seven swing states saying the election was corrupt.
In his calls with the DOJ leadership, he referenced among others: Jeffrey Clark, a lower-level official at DOJ, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and State Senator Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, who would all play key roles in the coming events.
Trump had been meeting with Jordan, Perry and other House GOP leaders to plan out their efforts to throw out Biden’s victory at the January 6 election certification in the House. Mastriano provided and funded the buses to bring his constituents to events of January 6 and was part of the Stop the Steal’s activities at the US Capitol. Perry led the efforts to decertify the electors from his home state of Pennsylvania. His colleague, Representative Paul Gosar led the efforts to decertify the electors from his home state of Arizona. Representative Jody Hice of Georgia led the effort to decertify his state’s election results; he is now running against Brad Raffensberger, the Republican Secretary of State who refused to comply with Trump’s request to “find 12,000 votes” to overturn Trump’s defeat in Georgia.
Perry provided extensive unsupported claims of election fraud to Donoghue, claims that had already been investigated and completely debunked. The claims were that over 4,000 Pennsylvania voters had voted more than once and that electoral tallies were 205,000 votes larger than the number of voters who actually voted – over-votes. Donoghue forwarded the information to the US Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The US Attorney investigated, determined that there was no basis to the claims and reported back. In point of fact, only three voters actually attempted to vote twice and all three of those were for Trump. The claim about 205,000 over-votes were due to delays in four counties in entering their data in the state’s computer system; there were in fact no over-votes at all.
Perry introduced Clark to Trump in the week before Christmas, and Trump, Clark and Perry were meeting at the White House about throwing out the election results. Jeffrey Clark was the acting head of the Civil Division at DOJ. Shortly after Christmas, he asked Rosen and Donoghue for two urgent actions: 1) a meeting with the Director of National Intelligence to investigate a claim that China had hacked the election results and changed the votes and 2) a letter from DOJ to the Governors and Speakers of the Assembly and President of the Senate of seven swing states stating that DOJ had evidence of electoral irregularities in their states and that their state legislatures should meet and take corrective action. They did clear him to meet with Director of National Intelligence who in turn informed Clark there was no Chinese hacking of the Dominion voting systems or changing any of the vote results. They refused to sign and send the Clark letter to the seven swing states explaining there was no evidence of voting irregularities to warrant it. This led Clark to tell Rosen and Donoghue that he had met with Trump, and they would be fired and replaced by Clark if they did not sign and send the Clark letter to the seven swing states. They refused to sign and were called into the White House where Trump raised the prospect of replacing them with Clark due to the failure to find the non-existent election fraud. They were called in again on January 3 for a three hour show down meeting with Trump and Clark. The top DOJ and White House lawyers told Trump they would resign en masse if he took the actions he was threatening. Trump backed off the planned firing and avoided a New Year’s massacre of the top lawyers in the White House and the Department of Justice, and the letter was never sent.
At the end of December, Trump and his private attorneys (Eric Olsen who had been involved in the Paxton lawsuit) were seeking to file an original complaint in the Supreme Court similar if not identical to Texas v. Pennsylvania to invalidate the elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. Trump tried to pressure DOJ to file the lawsuits and briefs on the President’s behalf seeking to overturn his election defeat. The DOJ resisted and explained to Trump that there was no cause of action, no standing, and no legal basis for DOJ to bring the lawsuit requested either on candidate Trump’s behalf or on behalf of the United States.
Just before New Year’s, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows sought to have DOJ and the FBI investigate multiple unsupported claims of fraud in Georgia and New Mexico. The first Georgia claim was that the CIA was working with an Italian aerospace company to alter the election results using military satellites to change the votes from Trump to Biden – a claim that was being pressed by Rudy Giuliani. The second Georgia claim was that 66,427 underage voters in Georgia had cast their ballots. The truth was that 4 voters had turned 18 and then cast absentee ballots. The third was that thousands of Georgia voters voted twice in Georgia and another state. There was no truth to that. The fourth was a claim that there were signature anomalies in the Fulton County (Atlanta) voting. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State had investigated all the claims and found they lacked any merit. Trump attorneys Cleta Mitchell and Rudy Giuliani were the conduits for the many claims about Georgia’s elections.
On New Year’s Day, DOJ’s top leadership was asked by Meadows to investigate issues with Dominion voting systems in New Mexico, vote dumps, and votes showing up out of “thin air”. The local election officials and even the New Mexico Supreme Court had already heard these GOP complaints, investigated them, and ruled against the Trump election team. For example, GOP districts and Democratic precincts reported at different times, causing the candidates’ vote totals to oscillate; the ballots from a local Indian reservation arrived later than other votes because they had to be driven from the Navajo reservation to the local county clerk’s office.
Trump asked Barr to investigate claims about suitcases of votes in Atlanta. Both the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, and the FBI investigated and found no merit to the claims; these were simply ballot boxes being counted in the presence of observers from both parties. Donoghue and Rosen repeatedly explained this to Trump in meetings during the end of December 2020 and the first few days in January 2021. During the January 3 show down meeting in the White House, Trump insisted that the US Attorney for Atlanta, BJ Pak, be fired for not finding electoral fraud, and replaced by a Trump favorite Bobby Christine who was the US Attorney for the Southern District. During that same time frame, Trump called Brad Raffensberger, the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to find 12,000 votes so that Trump would win the Georgia Presidential election.
What’s wrong with all this? In the US, you cannot use the federal (or a state) government to kill your opponent, to put him or her in jail, to campaign for you, to steal votes, to alter vote tallies, to overturn election defeats. The role of government is to hold elections, to assure all voters of their rights to vote, and then to count the votes accurately. The role of the Presidential (or other) candidates is to persuade you to vote for them. It is not to take away or disqualify your vote.
In the 19th Century, political parties would stock and stack the government with their supporters who would then turn out the votes of their friends, families, and communities; this was the spoils or patronage system. To put it gently there was a lot of corruption, including Presidents assassinated by their supporters, turned disappointed job seekers. Civil Service was instituted in 1883 by the Pendleton Act so government jobs were awarded on demonstrated professional merit not on a person’s political affiliation. Top agency positions are Presidential appointees, subject to Senate approval. The Hatch Act was instituted during the Great Depression after a series of scandals using the WPA for partisan electoral purposes (in this case FDR); government employees could not use their jobs with the government to campaign for and assure the election of their favorite candidate. After Watergate where Attorney General John Mitchell went to jail, other attorneys and political appointees went to jail and/or were disbarred, and President Nixon resigned in disgrace, Attorneys General Edward Levi and Griffen Bell adopted policies and protocols so that the Department of Justice and the FBI, would not be outsourced to do the political dirty tricks of the administration in power.
We now know from this first report that the top lawyers at DOJ stood firm against the President’s efforts to subvert the election, and that several lower-level DOJ political appointees conspired with the President to try to overturn his electoral defeat in multiple swing states. We know which US Attorneys stood firm against the President’s efforts to overturn the election and which public and private attorneys should face bar discipline and the potential for disbarment. We now know the Presdent’s game plan – use GOP controlled state legislatures to over-rule the political will of their state’s voters. We know which Congresspersons were willing to override the choice of the nation’s voters, and we now know from this report who were their leaders in this particular effort to corrupt the DOJ.
There is still much more to be investigated. What roles if any did Trump appointees at DOD and Homeland Security play in the intelligence failures and slow response to the take-over of the US Capitol, and what roles if any did the White House play in planning the insurrection and the slow response? What state legislators were willing to play ball to over-ride the choices of the nation’s voters? Biden has waived executive privilege so that the pertinent files and documents can be reviewed by Congressional investigators and so that the appropriate personnel can be interviewed. Trump has directed advised his consiglieres not to cooperate in these investigations. Stay tuned.
Lucien Wulsin
10/10/21