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Footnote 1. Katie Benner, Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General, N.Y. Times (Jan. 22, 2021).
[ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/jeffrey-clark-trump-justice-department-election.html ]
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/us/politics/trump-election-fraud-report.html
Report Cites New Details of Trump Pressure on Justice Dept. Over Election
A Senate panel fleshed out how Donald Trump pursued his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to pursue unfounded reports of fraud.
IMAGE
Jeffrey Clark, who led the Justice Department’s civil division, was working with President Trump to devise ways to cast doubt on the election results.Credit... Susan Walsh/Associated Press
By Katie Benner [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Benner ]
Oct. 6, 2021
WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of President Donald J. Trump, it was an extraordinary Oval Office showdown. On the agenda was Mr. Trump’s desire to install a loyalist as acting attorney general to carry out his demands for more aggressive investigations into his baseless claims of election fraud.
On the other side during that meeting on the evening of Jan. 3 were the top leaders of the Justice Department, who warned Mr. Trump that they and other senior officials would resign en masse if he followed through. They received immediate support from another key participant: Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel. According to others at the meeting, Mr. Cipollone indicated that he and his top deputy, Patrick F. Philbin, would also step down if Mr. Trump acted on his plan.
Mr. Trump’s proposed plan, Mr. Cipollone argued, would be a “murder-suicide pact,” one participant recalled. Only near the end of the nearly three-hour meeting did Mr. Trump relent and agree to drop his threat.
Mr. Cipollone’s stand that night is among the new details contained in a lengthy interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee about Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to do his bidding in the chaotic final weeks of his presidency.
The report draws on document's emails and testimony from three top Justice Department officials, including the acting attorney general for Mr. Trump’s last month in office, Jeffrey A. Rosen; the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, and Byung J. Pak, who until early January was U.S. attorney in Atlanta.
It provides the most complete account yet of Mr. Trump’s efforts to push the department to validate election fraud claims that had been disproved by the F.B.I. and state investigators.
The interim report, released on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off the pressure during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television, and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command.
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
The report by Mr. Durbin’s committee hews closely to previous accounts of the final days of the Trump administration, which led multiple Congressional panels and the Justice Department’s watchdog to open investigations.
Image
As Mr. Rosen prepared to become acting attorney general, an aide to Mr. Trump emailed him about specious allegations of fraud in the 2020 election.Credit...Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
But, drawing in particular on interviews with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue, both of whom were at the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, it brings to light new details that underscore the intensity and relentlessness with which Mr. Trump pursued his goal of upending the election, and the role that key government officials played in his efforts.
On at least nine occasions - in December and early January, the report found, -Mr. Trump asked officials to take actions that they believed would undermine an election result that they had deemed to be valid, and that he and his allies contacted department leaders nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
On Dec. 14, the same day that Attorney General William P. Barr informed Mr. Trump that he was stepping down, leaving Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump had an aide email Mr. Rosen two items, the report said. [ A, B]
A. One was a set of talking points about claims of voter fraud in Michigan.
B. The other was a purported examination of "problems with Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan".
For the next three weeks, the report said, Mr. Trump would continue to push the Justice Department to investigate similarly specious allegations.
The report fleshes out the role of Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who participated in multiple conversations with Mr. Trump about how to upend the election and who pushed his superiors to send Georgia officials a letter that falsely claimed the Justice Department had identified “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.”
Mr. Trump was weighing whether to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.
At the start of the Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting, Mr. Rosen recounted, Mr. Trump said, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”
The report also detailed a Jan. 2 confrontation during which Mr. Clark seemed to both threaten and coerce Mr. Rosen to send the letter.
He first raised the prospect that Mr. Trump could fire Mr. Rosen, and then said that he would decline any offer to replace Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general if Mr. Rosen sent the letter.
Mr. Clark also revealed - during that meeting - that he had secretly conducted a witness interview with someone in Georgia in connection with election fraud allegations that had already been disproved.
The report raised "fresh questions" about what role Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, played in the White House effort to pressure the Justice Department to help upend the election.
Mr. Perry called Mr. Donoghue to pressure him into investigating debunked election fraud allegations that had been made in Pennsylvania, the report said, and he complained to Mr. Donoghue that the Justice Department was not doing enough to look into such claims.
Mr. Clark, the report said, also told officials that he had participated in the White House’s efforts at Mr. Perry’s request, and that the lawmaker took him to a meeting at the Oval Office to discuss voter fraud.
That meeting occurred at around the same time that Mr. Perry and members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met at the White House to discuss the Jan. 6 certification of the election results.
The report confirmed that Mr. Trump was the reason that Mr. Pak hastily left his role as U.S. attorney in Atlanta, an area that Mr. Trump wrongly told people he had won. Mr. Trump told top Justice Department officials that Mr. Pak was a "never-Trumper", and he blamed Mr. Pak for the F.B.I.’s failure to find evidence of mass election fraud there.
Trump’s Bid to Subvert the Election
Card 1 of 6 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< CAPTURE OF ALL 6 cards DONE
A monthslong campaign. [ 1OF6]
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. [ 2OF6]
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. [ 3OF6]
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.” [ 4OF6]
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. [ 5OF6]
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.
Partisan election reviews. [ 6OF6]
Since leaving office, Mr. Trump and his loyalists have embraced partisan reviews of the 2020 election.
In Arizona, a criticized Republican review of the results in the state’s largest county failed to support Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud.
Despite that, the so-called "Stop the Steal movement" appears to be racing forward as more G.O.P. politicians announce Arizona-style reviews in other states.
During the Jan. 3 meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Donoghue and others tried to convince Mr. Trump not to fire Mr. Pak, as he planned to resign in just a few days. But Mr. Trump made it clear to the officials that Mr. Pak was to leave the following day, leading Mr. Donoghue to phone him that evening and tell him he should pre-emptively resign.
Mr. Trump also went outside the normal line of succession to push for a perceived loyalist, Bobby L. Christine, to run the Atlanta office.
Mr. Christine had been the U.S. attorney in Savannah, and had donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Image
The Senate report found that Byung J. Pak resigned as U.S. attorney in Atlanta before he could be fired by Mr. Trump.Credit...Ron Harris/Associated Press
Republicans have sought for months to downplay reports of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign, arguing that he simply cast a wide net for legal advice and correctly concluded that it would be a mistake to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, echoed those sentiments on Thursday [DATE ] with the release of a report - by committee Republicans, which called Mr. Trump’s actions “consistent with his responsibilities as president to faithfully execute the law and oversee the Executive Branch.”
But Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Pak — all Republicans — testified that Mr. Trump was not "seeking their legal advice", but strong-arming them to violate their oaths of office, undermine the results of the election and subvert the Constitution.
The report is not the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final word on the pressure campaign.
The panel is still waiting for the National Archives to furnish documents, calendar appointments and communications involving the White House that concern efforts to subvert the election. It asked the National Archives, which stores correspondence and documents generated by previous presidential administrations, for the records this spring.
It is also waiting to see whether Mr. Clark will sit for an interview and help provide missing details about what was happening inside the White House during the Trump administration’s final weeks. Additionally, the committee has asked the District of Columbia Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys, to open a disciplinary investigation into Mr. Clark based on its findings.
The report recommended that the Justice Department tighten procedures concerning when it can take certain overt steps in election-related fraud investigations. As attorney general, the report said, Mr. Barr weakened the department’s decades-long strict policy of not taking investigative steps in fraud cases until after an election is certified, a measure that is meant to keep the fact of a federal investigation from impacting the election outcome.
The Senate panel found that Mr. Barr personally demanded that the department investigate voter fraud allegations, even if other authorities had looked into them and not found evidence of wrongdoing. These allegations included a claim by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a prime force behind the unfounded election fraud allegations, that he had a tape that showed Democratic poll workers kicking their Republican counterparts from a polling station and fraudulently adding votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. into the count.
On Dec. 1, just two weeks before saying he would step down, Mr. Barr said that the Justice Department had found no evidence of voter fraud widespread enough to change the fact that Mr. Biden had won the presidency.
But Mr. Trump kept coming back to unsubstantiated accounts of election fraud.
Soon after the completion of the Oval Office meeting on the night of Jan. 3, the committee’s report said, Mr. Trump reached out to Mr. Donoghue, asking him to look into reports that the Department of Homeland Security had taken possession of a truck full of shredded ballots outside of Atlanta.
The report turned out to be false.
Trump’s Battle Against Election Results
Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General
Jan. 22, 2021
Pennsylvania Lawmaker Played Key Role in Trump’s Plot to Oust Acting Attorney General
Jan. 23, 2021
Former Acting Attorney General Testifies About Trump’s Efforts to Subvert Election
Aug. 7, 2021
Former U.S. attorney in Atlanta says Trump wanted to fire him for not backing election fraud claims.
Aug. 11, 2021
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
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 8, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
" Report Provides In-Depth Picture Of Trump’s Ploys." Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe ..."
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ORIGINAL SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/jeffrey-clark-trump-justice-department-election.html
Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General
Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist.
IMAGE Jeffrey Clark, who led the Justice Department’s civil division, had been working with President Donald Trump to devise ways to cast doubt on the election results.Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press
( By Katie Benner ) [ https://www.nytimes.com/by/katie-benner ] Published Jan. 22, 2021 [Updated Aug. 11, 2021]
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
The answer was unanimous. They would resign.
Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.
The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.
Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers because of “the strictures of legal privilege.” “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”
Mr. Clark categorically denied that he devised any plan to oust Mr. Rosen, or to formulate recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the internet.
“My practice is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims,” Mr. Clark said. “There was a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president. It is unfortunate that those who were part of a privileged legal conversation would comment in public about such internal deliberations, while also distorting any discussions.”
Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.
Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”
The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.” Mr. Clark agreed and said that “legal privileges” prevented him from divulging specifics regarding the conversation.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen.
When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.
Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.
(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)
Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.
But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.
As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.
IMAGE
Election workers performing a recount in Atlanta in November. Mr. Trump focused on Georgia’s election outcome after he lost the state.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.
As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election.
Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.
As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.
Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.
On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong.
The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.
Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up.
He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen - midday on Sunday - that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.
He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.
"Trump’s Bid to Subvert the Election" "Card 1 of 6" [above]
1. A months long 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4.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.
5. 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.
6. Partisan election reviews. Since leaving office, Mr. Trump and his loyalists have embraced partisan reviews of the 2020 election. In Arizona, a criticized Republican review of the results in the state’s largest county failed to support Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud. Despite that, the so-called Stop the Steal movement appears to be racing forward as more G.O.P. politicians announce Arizona-style reviews in other states.
Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.
IMAGE
Mr. Clark asked Mr. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.Credit...Ting Shen for The New York Times
Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.
Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.
The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.
Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.
Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.
Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.
After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.
Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.
They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
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
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 23, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline:
" Mutiny Halted Trump Scheme In Justice Dept. " . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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SOURCE COPY: https://us.newschant.com/politics/trump-and-justice-dept-lawyer-said-to-have-plotted-to-oust-acting-attorney-general/
TITLE "Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General (January 22, 2021)"
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s high leaders listened in surprised silence this month: One of their friends, they had been informed, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as appearing lawyer common and wield the division’s energy to power Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election outcomes.
The unassuming lawyer who labored on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising methods to cast doubt on the election outcomes and to bolster Mr. Trump’s persevering with authorized battles and the stress on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to perform these plans, Mr. Trump was about to determine whether or not to replace Mr. Rosen and substitute him with Mr. Clark.
The division officers, convened on a convention name, then requested one another: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
The answer was unanimous. They would resign.
Their casual pact finally helped persuade Mr. Trump to preserve Mr. Rosen in place, calculating {that a} furor over mass resignations on the high of the Justice Department would eclipse any consideration on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s resolution got here solely after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing circumstances to him in a weird White House meeting that two officers in contrast with an episode of Mr. Trump’s actuality present “The Apprentice,” albeit one that might immediate a constitutional disaster.
The beforehand unknown chapter was the fruits of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He additionally pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint particular counsels, together with one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election tools that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely mentioned was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This account of the division’s ultimate days beneath Mr. Trump’s management is predicated on interviews with 4 former Trump administration officers who requested not to be named due to concern of retaliation.
Mr. Clark mentioned that this account contained "inaccuracies" - however didn’t specify, including that he couldn’t focus on any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department attorneys.
“Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he mentioned.
“All my official communications were consistent with law.”
Mr. Clark additionally famous that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request final month asking a federal choose to reject a lawsuit that sought to stress Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the outcomes of the election.
Mr. Trump declined to remark. An adviser mentioned that Mr. Trump has persistently argued that the justice system ought to examine “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”
The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.”
A Justice Department spokesman declined to remark, as did Mr. Rosen.
When Mr. Trump mentioned on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the division, some officers thought that he may enable Mr. Rosen a brief reprieve earlier than urgent him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr could be round for an additional week.
Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the subsequent day. He needed the Justice Department to file authorized briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits looking for to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint particular counsels to examine not solely unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but in addition Dominion, the voting machines agency.
(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted these accusations into 4 federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that had been all dismissed.)
Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make selections primarily based on the details and the regulation, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately informed Mr. Trump: The division had investigated voting irregularities and discovered no proof of widespread fraud.
But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in telephone calls and in individual. He repeatedly mentioned that he didn’t perceive why the Justice Department had not discovered proof that supported conspiracy theories concerning the election that a few of his personal attorneys had espoused. He declared that the division was not combating arduous sufficient for him.
As Mr. Rosen and the deputy lawyer common, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed again, they had been unaware that Mr. Clark had been launched to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had informed the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election outcomes.
Mr. Trump shortly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the appearing head of the civil division in September and was additionally the top of the division’s environmental and pure resources division.
As December wore on, Mr. Clark talked about to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent lots of time studying on the web — a remark that alarmed them as a result of they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy concept that Mr. Trump had received the election. Mr. Clark additionally informed them that he needed the division to maintain a information convention asserting that it was investigating critical accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.
As Mr. Trump centered more and more on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. lawyer in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not attempting to discover proof for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it may not be tenable for him to proceed to lead it, in accordance to two individuals aware of the dialog.
That dialog and Mr. Trump’s efforts to stress Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.
Mr. Clark was additionally centered on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he needed Mr. Rosen to ship to Georgia state legislators that wrongly mentioned that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud of their state, and that they need to transfer to void Mr. Biden’s win there.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue once more rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.
On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to focus on Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the division’s conclusion that the election outcomes had been legitimate. Mr. Donoghue flatly informed Mr. Clark that what he was doing was mistaken. The subsequent day, Mr. Clark informed Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him whereas they labored collectively on the regulation agency Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to focus on his technique to the president early the subsequent week, simply earlier than Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.
Unbeknown to the appearing lawyer common, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then knowledgeable Mr. Rosen noon on Sunday that the president meant to substitute him with Mr. Clark, who might then strive to cease Congress from certifying the Electoral College outcomes. He mentioned that Mr. Rosen might keep on as his deputy lawyer common, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.
Unwilling to step down with no struggle, Mr. Rosen mentioned that he wanted to hear straight from Mr. Trump and labored with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that night.
Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, gorgeous information broke out of Georgia: State officers had recorded an hourlong name, published by The Washington Post, throughout which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture sufficient votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted via Washington, the president’s determined bid to change the end result in Georgia got here into sharp focus.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed forward, informing Steven Engel, the top of the Justice Department’s office of authorized counsel, about Mr. Clark’s newest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon name with the division’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to substitute Mr. Rosen.
[ https://us.newschant.com/politics/trump-and-justice-dept-lawyer-said-to-have-plotted-to-oust-acting-attorney-general/ ]
Mr. Rosen deliberate to quickly head to the White House to focus on his destiny, Mr. Donoghue informed the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, all of them agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan introduced to thoughts the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon period, the place Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned slightly than perform the president’s order to fireplace the particular prosecutor investigating him.
The Clark plan, the officers concluded, would severely hurt the division, the federal government and the rule of regulation.
For hours, they anxiously messaged and referred to as each other as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s destiny.
Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met on the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and different attorneys.
Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark current their arguments to him.
Mr. Cipollone suggested the president not to fireplace Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he didn’t advocate sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers.
Mr. Engel suggested Mr. Trump that he and the division’s remaining high officers would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone on the division.
[ https://us.newschant.com/politics/trump-and-justice-dept-lawyer-said-to-have-plotted-to-oust-acting-attorney-general/ ]
Mr. Trump appeared considerably swayed by the concept - firing Mr. Rosen would set off not solely chaos on the Justice Department, but in addition congressional investigations and presumably recriminations from different Republicans and distract consideration from his efforts to overturn the election outcomes.
After practically three hours, Mr. Trump finally determined that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to keep.
Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded that they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress licensed Mr. Biden’s victory, there could be little for them to do till they left together with Mr. Trump in two weeks.
They started to exhale days later because the Electoral College certification on the Capitol received underway. And then they obtained phrase: The constructing had been breached.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
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