By Peter W. Stevenson (TWP)
New reporting on emails sent from the Trump White House to the Justice Department in the aftermath of the 2020 election reveals a president intent on leveraging any possible shred of evidence that the election was somehow rigged against him into an effort to stay in office.
Voters had picked Joe Biden to replace President Donald Trump more than a month earlier; by mid-December, all 50 states had certified their election results, including states like Georgia and Arizona, where Trump hoped he could somehow overturn results.
Then-Attorney General William P. Barr (left), White House Counsel Pat Cipollone (right) and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen (center) at the White House in 2019. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian reports Trump’s staff began pressuring the incoming acting attorney general on Dec. 14, 2020, before he even formally took the job — and before announcing then-Attorney General William P. Barr would step down from the post.
Trump’s assistant sent Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who would become acting attorney general 10 days later, an email asking him to take action on Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, and included a list of complaints.
Demirjian writes:
“It’s indicative of what the machines can and did do to move votes,” the document Trump sent to Rosen reads. “We believe it has happened everywhere.”
Rosen didn’t ultimately launch a formal investigation into the election during his time as acting attorney general. Barr had taken the unusual step of issuing orders to U.S. attorneys nationwide that said they could investigate allegations of voter fraud, but at the beginning of December said the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Trump had become focused on one specific county in Michigan, where activists alleged results had been falsified (a tabulation error had briefly contributed to misreported results but was fixed within 48 hours, and an audit later confirmed the corrected results were accurate).
The Post’s Philip Bump writes that the episode illustrates two alarming issues in the Trump White House:
The first is the demonstrated credulousness of the president of the United States in embracing disproved or obviously ridiculous conspiracy theories about the election in an effort to retain power and/or assuage his pride. The second is an immediate staff perfectly willing to do the work of putting Trump’s cockamamie ideas in front of senior government officials as though they were worthy of time or effort.
It was soon clear that Justice Department officials didn’t take Trump’s claims seriously, per additional reporting on the Trump team’s emails by CNN; When White House chief of staff Mark Meadows sent another email at the beginning of January asking that the Justice Department examine allegations of problems with ballots in Georgia, Rosen forwarded it to a colleague, asking, “Can you believe this?”
Trump aides continued to send Justice Department officials purported, but false, “evidence” of voter fraud into the New Year.
We already knew about Trump’s public pressure campaign on state-level officials, and the appeals he made to his voter base ahead of the final election confirmation at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — and what happened that day.
But the emails show how much Trump was willing to politicize the Justice Department to further his false election claims, and how much he was willing to weaponize the federal government. Trump wanted to stay in the White House, and seemed willing to use any possible tool — and any possible claim of voter fraud, regardless of its legitimacy — to try to do it.
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