Former President Donald Trump has reportedly pressed the Justice Department during his waning weeks in office to join his failed effort to overturn his election defeat based on his false claims of voting fraud. The documents released showed that the leaders have refused all such claims with one criticizing the incident as pure insanity of the claims.
The Reform Committee and the House of Representatives which have obtained the records as part of an investigation have outlined a series of overtures made by the Republican former president, then the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and an external private attorney, Kurt Olsen, who pushed the department to act on Trump’s claims.
The department did not ultimately join the effort and numerous other courts rejected the lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results in various states.
Congress is also investigating the terrifying January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters who were trying to stop the formal certification of the Democratic President’s Joe Biden’s election victory.
Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat said that these documents show that President Trump had tried to corrupt the nation’s chief law enforcement agency in an unabashed attempt to overturn an election that he had lost.
These overtures were different from the revelations that the Trump-era Justice Department had secretly sought from the phone records of at least two Democratic lawmakers, a move that led Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday to vow to strengthen the policies aiming to protect the department from political influence.
The department under outgoing Attorney General William Barr, who left his designated post on December 23, and his short-span replacement Jeffrey Rosen, have decided not to act on the false claims of voting fraud. Joe Biden took to the office on January 21.
Moreover, the emails have shown that Meadows has asked the Justice Department officials to investigate an unfounded conspiracy theory called Italygate that alleges that the U.S. data was changed in the Italian facilities with the knowledge of the CIA.
On January 1, Meadows sent Rosen a link to a YouTube video that detailed the theory. Rosen had forwarded the email to the then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who replied Pure Insanity.
The documents showed that Trump had pressured Rosen when he was the deputy attorney general to have the Justice Department take up the election fraud claims.
The emails also showed that Rosen had declined to arrange a meeting between Trump and the Justice Department officials about the false claims. Trump through his assistant had sent Rosen an email with documents claiming to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan which the federal judge had already rejected.
Representatives of Trump did not respond immediately to the request for comment.
The release of the document comes ahead of the House Oversight committee’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray and General Charles Flynn, who had also voiced for Trump’s election conspiracy.