New documents released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee detail Donald Trump’s attempt to get Department of Justice officials to declare the 2020 presidential election “corrupt” and “illegal.”
Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue took notes during a call with Trump on December 27, 2020.
“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” Trump said to the two officials during a phone call.
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The officials say that they told Trump that they did not have the power to change the election outcome. Rosen and Donoghue also told Trump that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud found during investigations. Trump says that the election was stolen from him and rigged. He specifically mentioned that the election results in Georgia, Michigan, and Arizona were corrupted.
“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Trump said during the call with the two officials. “People want me to replace DOJ leadership.”
“We’re not in a position based on the evidence. We can only act on actual evidence developed,” Rosen and Donoghue explained to a disgruntled Trump.
Emails released last month show that Trump and his allies in the last weeks of his time in office pressured the Justice Department to investigate unsubstantiated claims of widespread 2020 election fraud, and the department’s inspector general is looking into whether department officials tried to subvert the results.
Rosen and Donoghue are expected to testify before the House Oversight Committee. The Committee is currently conducting a formal investigation on Trump and the extent of his petition to overturn the election results.
“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 Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, said. “The Committee has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former President’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay.”
