Trump's chief of staff pressed the courts to investigate allegations of electoral fraud

The White House Chief of Staff in the Donald Trump administration, Mark Meadows, addresses the press in an image from October 2020.Alexander Drago / Reuters

Donald Trump's circle fought to the last gasp to try to uncover an alleged fraud in the November presidential election, not only in public speeches, but also behind the scenes. The Republican's White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was pressuring the Justice Department to investigate baseless allegations of voter fraud between late December 2020 and early January 2021, as recorded in five emails to the accessed by

The New York Times

.

In them, Meadows asks the then acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, to open investigations into alleged irregularities already denied in the State of New Mexico and other baseless theories, including one according to which voting machines had been hacked from Italy by people who used military technology and traded votes in favor of Trump for votes in favor of Biden.

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By the time these messages were sent, Biden's victory had already been certified by the Electoral College, and for weeks now, Attorney General William Barr had declared that the Justice Department had found no evidence of any significant wrongdoing. as if to reverse the victory of Democrat Joe Biden. Barr resigned on December 15, and Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen took office on an interim basis until the change of government.

The emails have come to light in the framework of an investigation opened by the Senate Judiciary Committee to establish whether members of the Justice Department had participated in Trump's attempts to reverse his electoral defeat, alleging irregularities on which courts throughout the country found no basis. In the messages, according to the

Times

, there is no sign that Rosen agreed to examine the allegations shared by Meadows and, in fact, it shows how he refuses to organize a meeting between the FBI and a man who has posted videos on the Internet defending the theory of the fraud perpetrated from Italy.

More than half of Republican voters continue to believe that Biden did not win the elections legitimately, according to the different polls published since the change of Administration, selling the theory of a systematic electoral fraud and of which justice has not found a trace.

This Saturday night, during a speech in North Carolina, Trump himself insisted on it: "We had a great election, but things happened," he said.

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