No One is Above the Law: Justice Closing in on Donald J. Trump and His Cohorts

 

Walls: Meet “The Donald”

Major story here from AFP news with this headline:

“Trump pressured DOJ to just say election was corrupt”

Trump heavily pressured the DOJ late last year to back his unsupported election fraud claims, pushing a top official “to declare the vote corrupt,” just released documents showed.

In December 2020, Trump pressured the Justice Department to declare the presidential election corrupt despite the lack of evidence to support that claim

Trump told then-acting AG Jeffrey Rosen (in place after Trump fired AG William Barr) and that  is according to contemporaneous notes of his conversation with the president taken by Dep AG Richard Donoghue wherein Trump told Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me.”

Earlier Rosen had told Trump in their extraordinary December 27, 2020 discussion that the DOJ had looked into his claims of voter and ballot fraud and found no evidence. 

Rosen then said: “Understand that the DOJ can't and won't snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election – it doesn't work that way,” (also according to the Donoghue notes). But Trump was desperate to reverse his November election defeat by now-President Joe Biden, he said again: “We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election.”

This record of Trump's pressure on the department, just a week before his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the EC certification supervised by VP Mike Pence of the national election results, was released Friday (July 30) by the House Committee on Oversight, which is investigating Trump's unprecedented efforts to overturn the vote. 

Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said: “These handwritten notes show that then President Trump directly instructed our nation's top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.”

Noteworthy: That Trump pressure on Rosen came days after Trump had fired AG Bill Barr for refusing to accept the real estate mogul's claims of election fraud. 

Note: Barr said in a recent interview that he had told Trump at the beginning of December that the fraud claims were “Büllshït.”

The Washington Post also recently reported that after Rosen replaced Barr, Trump called him “nearly every day to press the fraud claims.”

Trump also mused to Rosen that he could be replaced with a lower-level Justice Department Attorney, Jeffrey Clark, who, according to later reports, actually helped the president devise a plan to force Rosen out. 

Clark, according to reports, supported Trump's claims of election fraud, though no evidence has ever surfaced of significant wrongdoing in any of the states or districts that delivered the election to Biden.

The House committee is citing Donoghue's notes and other records to call him, Clark, Trump's then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and other top officials to testify about Trump's campaign to reverse the election. 

Noteworthy: The DOJ said it would not seek to assert White House executive privilege to block their testimony.

Meanwhile, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a new lawsuit calling for the DOJ to investigate Trump and Meadows for violating Federal civil rights law, saying in part “that those two illegally attempted to weaponize the Department of Justice as part of their larger campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.” 

CREW President Noah Bookbinder further stated: “These alarming and illegal acts were part of a broader conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their right to vote and to have their votes counted.”

My 2 Cents: Quite simply stated. The walls are closing in on Trump and those close to him and their criminal illegal acts, and rightly so. 

We now wait to see justice take it rightful course, stay tuned. 

Thanks for stopping by.