| "Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, the former president is said to have told top law enforcement officials, documents show. |
| By Katie Benner July 30, 2021Updated 4:45 p.m. ET 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 that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times. 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 department had disproved. 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 of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson 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 acknowledged Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect but that he has 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 immediately 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 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. 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. (Continued) |
