WASHINGTON — Documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee detail then-President Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure the Department of Justice to pursue his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election and help overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
The emails illustrate the behind-the-scenes efforts Trump’s White House took to pressure federal officials while he simultaneously pushed the same unsubstantiated claims on Twitter. The messages were sent from mid-December to early January and were made public by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.
Among the efforts was pressure on the Department of Justice to intervene in lawsuits being pursued by Trump’s campaign and supporters to get the Supreme Court to overturn the results.
At the end of December, Trump’s White House assistant emailed then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other top Justice Department officials with a draft legal brief that the president wanted them to file with the Supreme Court. Kurt Olsen, a private attorney for Trump, also contacted department officials requesting the federal agency file the brief.
The 54-page brief called on the Supreme Court to declare that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada had administered the 2020 presidential election in violation of the Electors Clause and the 14th Amendment, claiming that the states changed election rules without legislative action. All six were swing states that Trump lost.
“Those unconstitutional changes allowed election irregularities in various forms,” said the complaint, which called on the high court to authorize a special election in those states to appoint new presidential electors.
Trump’s vocal public efforts to overturn the election were highly unusual, but had the DOJ intervened on his behalf it would have been viewed as an extraordinary use of the powers of the presidency to overturn the will of voters.
The messages are also riddled with conspiracy theories and Oversight Committee staff cited at least five instances when then-chief of staff Mark Meadows inquired about rumors that were circulating on the internet at the time but for which there was no supporting evidence.
For example, Meadows emailed Rosen a translated document from a person in Italy who claimed without evidence that he had “direct knowledge” of a plot that involved Italians changing the election results and then loading them into “military satellites.”
The documents begin with correspondences on Dec. 14, the day states certified Electoral College votes in the 2020 election and sealed Trump’s defeat.
Trump’s assistant sent an email to Rosen with the subject line “From POTUS” and attached materials that listed “talking points” about a “cover-up of voting crimes” in Michigan, a state that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes.
About an hour after the email was sent, Trump announced that Attorney General William Barr would be stepping down from his position and Rosen would be taking over as acting attorney general.
Just after midnight the following day, Trump tweeted: “This is BIG NEWS. Dominion Voting Machines are a disaster all over the Country. Changed the Results of a landslide election … ” It’s a claim that Trump made repeatedly during his efforts to overturn the election, but which there has never been evidence provided to substantiate.
Emails from the end of December and early January showed that White House officials including Meadows, directed then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to advance the election fraud claims by reaching out to a U.S. attorney in Georgia, Byung J. Pak. NBC News previously reported that Trump was considering firing Rosen at the time and replacing him with Clark.
The email correspondence among Trump administration officials extended into early January, just days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when hundreds of Trump supporters broke into the building with the goal of interrupting the counting of electoral votes and reversing Biden’s win.
In the end, Trump was unsuccessful in getting his Justice Department to take legal action to overturn the presidential results. A few days after Biden’s inauguration, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced that he would investigate whether any current or former officials engaged in an “improper attempt to have DOJ seek to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”
Maloney said Tuesday that she has asked that Meadows and the former Justice Department officials involved in the pressure campaign appear for transcribed interviews before the committee.