At a White House meeting exactly two months after the 2020 presidential election, senior officials at the Department of Justice threatened to resign en masse if Donald Trump followed through on his plan to install a loyalist as acting attorney general.
Even members of Trump’s legal team threatened to quit. Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel who defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, warned Trump that his plan to elevate a sycophant to the upper echelon of the DOJ was a “murder-suicide pact.” Cipollone indicated that he and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, would both step down in protest.
And acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue insisted, “that the mass resignations likely would not end there, and that U.S. Attorneys and other DOJ officials might also resign en masse.”
Trump ultimately relented and the plot to jettison acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an official who was amenable to pursuing debunked claims of election fraud, sputtered out.
The revelations stem from an interim report prepared by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Trump’s relentless push to get the DOJ to help him overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL), the chairman of the committee, said the report indicates that Trump would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
“Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort,” Durbin added.
The report, which draws on testimony from top DOJ officials, says Clark repeatedly sought to “induce Rosen into helping Trump’s election subversion scheme.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee has requested that the DC bar investigate Clark, since attorneys are prohibited from assisting in fraud.
Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also repeatedly pressured Rosen to open an investigation into debunked election fraud schemes, “violating longstanding restrictions on White House intervention in DOJ law enforcement matters.”
CNN reports on additional details from the report:
In multiple calls, Trump claimed there was election fraud in Pennsylvania and Arizona — both states he lost — telling Rosen “people are saying” and asking the Justice Department to look into the rumors, according to the committee.
Trump also told the DOJ leadership, “You guys aren’t following the internet the way I do,” according to both Donoghue and Rosen.
Rosen told the President the department “can’t and won’t just flip a switch and change the election.” That prompted Trump to simply ask for an official Justice announcement that the election was corrupt and then “leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen,” the committee report noted.
Appearing on CNN, Durbin said the U.S. was “half a step away from a constitutional crisis, a full-blown constitutional crisis.” He said Trump had a three part plan to undermine democracy:
First phase, Trump goes to court. Loses every lawsuit, which claims there was voter fraud in the election. Next, he decides he has to take over the Department of Justice and the attorney general, and have the attorney general push this narrative on to the states to tell them to stop from sending in their Electoral College vote totals. When that failed — and our report goes into graphic detail of the efforts that were made — the third step was to turn the mob loose on the Capitol the day we were counting the ballots.
