By Rebecca Shabad and Allan Smith - NBC News
Former President Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to
back his baseless allegations of voter fraud
in the 2020 elections and call for the annulment of Joe Biden's victory, according to documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
The emails, sent between mid-December and early January, show the maneuvers that the White House made to win the support of federal officials, while at the same time the then president spread false information on Twitter.
One of the strategies used to achieve their goal was to demand that the Justice Department
intercede in the lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters for the Supreme Court to
annul the result.
An assistant to Trump sent the then deputy attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and a group of senior justice officials the draft of a legal document that the former president wanted them to present before the highest judicial instance in the country.
The government of Donald Trump would have violated freedom of expression with spying on journalists
May 21, 202104: 18
A personal attorney for the former president, Kurt Olsen, also contacted several workers for the department to file the brief.
The document asked the Supreme Court to declare that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada had violated the Electors Clause and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, claiming that they had changed the rules.
All six are pendulum states
(they vote Democrats or Republicans depending on the election) that Trump lost
.
"These unconstitutional changes allowed electoral irregularities in various ways," says the lawsuit, which also required the Supreme Court to authorize the holding of special elections in those states to designate new presidential voters.
Trump's efforts to try to overturn the election were unusual.
But if the Justice Department had finally intervened in the matter, it would have been interpreted as an extraordinary use of power by the president to override the will of the voters.
The messages are also riddled with conspiracy theories.
Members of the Oversight Committee cited at least five situations in which then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows inquired about rumors circulating on the Internet without providing evidence.
An example: Meadows emailed the deputy attorney general a translated document from a person in Italy who allegedly claimed without evidence that he had "direct knowledge" of an Italian plot to change the election results and then send them to "military satellites. "
The pressure reached its zenith on January 1
, five days before the assault on the Capitol, when Meadows wrote to the Justice Department about the Italian conspiracy and complained about the results obtained by Trump in Georgia and New Mexico, where he lost more than 10 points.
"Sheer insanity," another deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, wrote to Rosen about the then White House chief of staff's theory.
The first message was sent on December 14, the day the states certified the counting of votes to the Electoral College and Trump's defeat was made official.
Trump's aide sent an email to Rosen titled "From POTUS" (President of the United States), in which he attached
material on "talking points" about an "election crime cover-up"
in Michigan. that Trump lost by more than 154,000 votes.
President Donald Trump removes his mask on the South Portico of the White House after returning from Walter Reed Hospital, where he was hospitalized for COVID-19.
An hour later, Trump announced the resignation of his attorney general, William Barr, and the name of his replacement: Rosen.
At midnight the next day, the former president tweeted: “GREAT NEWS.
[Election software company] Dominion's voting machines are a disaster across the country.
They changed the results of a landslide election ... ".
Trump repeated this accusation in his attempt to annul the elections, but never provided corroborating data.
Emails from late December and early January show that White House officials, including Meadows, asked then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to back up the fraud allegations by contacting Georgia Attorney General Byung J. Pak.
Trump failed in his attempt to win the support of the Justice Department
. Days after Biden's inauguration, on January 20, the department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced that he would investigate whether any current or former officials participated in an "improper attempt to have the DOJ attempt to alter the outcome of the elections. Presidential 2020 ".
