Senate report details Trump’s efforts to use DOJ to overturn election results

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Former President Donald Trump attends a rally in support of Georgia Republican Senators in December 2020.

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Trump continues to lie, says ‘real insurrection’ happened when he lost election

Rosen told the committee that Trump opened the three-hour meeting by saying: «One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.»

Trump was already considering replacing Rosen with a lower-ranking department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was promising to pursue Trump’s false election fraud claims.

Rosen and his deputies refused to endorse Trump’s claims, and pushed back against the president’s proposed scheme to dump Rosen for Clark.

The report says Donoghue and others made clear that all of the department’s assistant attorneys general would resign if Trump went forward with the scheme, and that mass resignations likely wouldn’t end there.

Rosen and Donoghue, who were both interviewed by the committee, said White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and another top White House lawyer, Patrick Philbin, also pushed back against Trump’s plan, and threatened to quit as well.

The report says Trump continued to entertain the idea of installing Clark at the helm of the Justice Department, and only abandoned the idea at the end of the Oval Office meeting.

The meeting was one of several ways in which Trump sought to pressure the Justice Department to pursue his election fraud claims.

Ultimately, Trump’s efforts failed, though he continues to push lies that the election was stolen.

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• Justice Department