Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election
Results Corrupt, Notes Show
“Leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies,
the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials.
The demands are the latest example of President Donald
J. Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to delegitimize the election results during his
final weeks in office.
Katie Benner
By Katie Benner
July 30, 2021
WASHINGTON
— President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last
year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no
instances of widespread fraud, so he and his allies in Congress could use the
assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided
to lawmakers.
The demands
were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that
is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal
agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign
during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.
The
exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the
acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard
P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the Justice Department had found no
evidence for. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change
the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that,
according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.
“Just say
that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional
allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.
Mr. Trump
did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, whom he described as a
“fighter”; Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who at the
time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator
Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to
bottom of things.”
Mr. Jordan
and Mr. Johnson denied any role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice
Department.
“Congressman
Jordan did not, has not, and would not pressure anyone at the Justice
Department about the 2020 election,” said Russell Dye, a spokesman for Mr.
Jordan, who voted to overturn election results in key states but has downplayed
his role in the president’s pressure campaign. “He continues to agree with
President Trump that it is perfectly appropriate to raise concerns about
election integrity.”
Mr. Johnson
had “no conversations with President Trump about the D.O.J. questioning the
election results,” said his spokeswoman, Alexa Henning. She noted that he had
acknowledged Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect but that he had also
called for what he sees as election irregularities to be fully investigated and
addressed to restore confidence in future elections.
Mr. Perry
did not respond to requests for comment. He has continued to assert Mr. Trump
won, but has not been tied directly to the White House effort to keep him in
office.
The phone
call by Mr. Trump was perhaps the most audacious moment in a monthslong
pressure campaign aimed at enlisting the Justice Department in his crusade to
overturn the election results.
After the
departure of Mr. Rosen’s predecessor, William P. Barr, became public on Dec.
14, Mr. Trump and his allies harangued Mr. Rosen and his top deputies nearly every
day until Jan. 6, when Congress met to certify the Electoral College and was
disrupted by Mr. Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol, according to emails
and other documents obtained by Congress and interviews with former Trump
administration officials.
The
conversations often included complaints about unfounded voter fraud conspiracy
theories, frustration that the Justice Department would not ask the Supreme
Court to invalidate the election and admonishments that department leaders had
failed to fight hard enough for Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The Justice
Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform
Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to
unlawfully reverse the election results.
Typically,
the department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private discussions
between a president and his cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would
prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents
out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.
But handing
over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr.
Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also
told Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and other former officials this week that they
could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight
and Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committees.
The
department reasoned that congressional investigators were examining potential
wrongdoing by a sitting president, an extraordinary circumstance, according to
letters sent to the former officials. Because executive privilege is meant to
benefit the country, rather than the president as an individual, invoking it
over Mr. Trump’s efforts to push his personal agenda would be inappropriate,
the department concluded.
“These
handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s
top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election
in the final days of his presidency,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney,
Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform
Committee, said in a statement.
Trump’s Bid to Subvert the Election
A
monthslong campaign. During his last days in office, President Donald J. Trump
and his allies undertook an increasingly urgent effort to undermine the
election results. That wide-ranging campaign included perpetuating false and
thoroughly debunked claims of election fraud as well as pressing government
officials for help.
Baseless
claims of voter fraud. Although Mr.Trump’s allegations of a stolen election
have died in the courts and election officials of both parties from every state
have said there is no evidence of fraud, Republicans across the country
continued to spread conspiracy theories. Those include 147 House Republicans
who voted against certifying the election.
Intervention
at the Justice Department. Rebuffed by ranking Republicans and cabinet officials
like Attorney General William P. Barr, who stepped down weeks before his tenure
was to end, Mr. Trump sought other avenues to peddle his unfounded claims. In a
bid to advance his personal agenda, Mr. Trump plotted to oust the acting
attorney general and pressed top officials to declare that the election was
corrupt. His chief of staff pushed the department to investigate an array of
outlandish and unfounded conspiracy theories that held that Mr. Trump had been
the victor.
Pressuring
state officials to 'find votes.' In a taped call, Mr. Trump urged Georgia’s
secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the presidential election
and vaguely warned of a “criminal offense.” And he twice tried to talk with a
leader of Arizona’s Republican party in a bid to reverse Joseph R. Biden’s
narrow victory there.
Contesting
Congress’s electoral tally on Jan. 6. As the president continued to refuse to
concede the election, his most loyal backers proclaimed Jan. 6, when Congress
convened to formalize Mr. Biden's electoral victory, as a day of reckoning. On
that day, Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary speech to thousands of his
supporters hours before a mob of loyalists violently stormed the Capitol.
Mr. Trump’s
conversation with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus
on overturning the election results. At one point, Mr. Trump claimed voter
fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted
elections.” Mr. Donoghue pushed back.
“Much of
the info you’re getting is false,” Mr. Donoghue said, adding that the
department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and
had not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations but they
don’t pan out,” the officials told Mr. Trump, according to the notes.
The
department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063
percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find
evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered
with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it found no
evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes.
Mr. Trump,
undeterred, brushed off the department’s findings. “OK fine — but what about
the others?” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes describing the president’s
remarks. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Donoghue to travel to Fulton County to verify
signatures on ballots.
The people
“saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt,” Mr. Trump told the
officials, adding that they needed to act. “Not much time left.”
At another
point, Mr. Donoghue said that the department could quickly verify or disprove
the assertion that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were
voters.
“Should be
able to check on that quickly, but understand that the D.O.J. can’t and won’t
snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that
way,” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes.
The
officials also told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no evidence to
support a lawsuit regarding the election results. “We are not in a position
based on the evidence,” they said. “We can only act on the actual evidence
developed.”
Mr. Trump
castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local
U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts
the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.”
“You guys
may not be following the internet the way I do,” Mr. Trump said, according to
the document.
In a moment
of foreshadowing, Mr. Trump said, “people tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should
put him in,” referring to the acting chief of the Justice Department’s civil
division, who had also encouraged department officials to intervene in the
election. “People want me to replace D.O.J. leadership.”
“You should
have the leadership you want,” Mr. Donoghue replied. But it would not change
the department’s position on a lack of widespread election fraud, he noted.
Mr.
Donoghue and Mr. Rosen did not know that Mr. Perry had introduced Mr. Clark to
Mr. Trump. One week later, they would be forced to fight Mr. Clark for their
jobs in an Oval Office showdown.
During the
call, Mr. Trump also told the Justice Department officials to “figure out what
to do” with Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son. “People will criticize the D.O.J. if
he’s not investigated for real,” he told them, violating longstanding
guidelines against White House intervention in criminal investigations or other
law enforcement actions.
Two days
after the phone call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Donoghue took notes of a meeting with
Justice Department officials that also included Mr. Trump’s chief of staff,
Mark Meadows; the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone; and the White House
deputy counsel Patrick Philbin. They met to discuss a conspiracy theory known
as Italygate, which asserts without evidence that people in Italy used military
technology to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.
The Justice
Department officials told the White House that they had assigned someone to
look into the matter, according to the notes and a person briefed on the
meeting. They did not mention that the department was looking into the theory
to debunk it, the person said.
While the
Justice Department officials kept the pressure campaign hidden from public
view, the emails obtained by Congress and interviews with former Trump
administration officials show they were alarmed by Mr. Trump’s behavior,
particularly when he complained about the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J.
Pak, whom he viewed as not doing enough to examine voter fraud accusations
there.
Mr. Pak
abruptly stepped down on Jan. 4, after Mr. Donoghue told him about the
president’s plot with Mr. Clark and of Mr. Trump’s concerns about Atlanta,
according to documents and interviews.
Nicholas
Fandos contributed reporting.
Katie
Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a
Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual
harassment issues. @ktbenner
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