On Thursday, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee released a report that reveals more details about how former President Donald Trump tried to use the Department of Justice and other government officials to invalidate the 2020 presidential election. The near 400-page report highlights a number of Trump’s actions in the report, including efforts to get the DOJ to declare the election “corrupt” in his bid to stay in the White House. It also states that Trump’s attempts provoked a near revolt in the department among officials who pushed back against the former president’s false claims of fraud, saying: “In attempting to enlist [the Justice Department] for personal, political purposes in an effort to maintain his hold on the White House, Trump grossly abused the power of the presidency. He also arguably violated the criminal provisions of the Hatch Act, which prevents any person — including the president — from commanding federal government employees to engage in political activity.”
In addition, the report stated that on Jan. 3, then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue and others met with Trump in the Oval Office to dissuade him from the idea, threatening to resign if it moved forward. White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy also threatened to resign if Trump insisted on the plot. Assistant U.S. Attorney Clark told Rosen in an earlier meeting that Trump had already decided to make him the next U.S. attorney general, and he wanted Rosen to stay on as a deputy, which led to the confrontational meeting with Trump, the report says. Donoghue told Trump that his actions would lead to a mass resignation that would include assistant attorneys general throughout the department along with other department officials.
The report also detailed a plan by Trump to pressure the department into filing a complaint with the U.S. Supreme Court on the chance that it could overturn the election results. Numerous legal challenges and recounts followed the election last fall and none of them produced any indication of widespread voter fraud.
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