He not only maintained the illusion of massive electoral fraud, before, during and after the 2020 presidential election. By design.
He didn’t just send his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory and fraudulently collecting money for a cause and a fund that didn’t exist.
The former American president, Donald Trump also carried out an unprecedented attack on the independence of the justice of the United States by seeking in the wake of his defeat to bend the office of the Attorney General so that it legitimizes his ” big lie” about the theft of the elections and that he is participating in his attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election of November 2020.
This was established Thursday by the parliamentary committee responsible for investigating the attack on the Capitol, on the fifth day of its public hearings, held in Washington.
The scheme uncovered by this commission of inquiry approached a critical point, three days before the insurrection, by attempting to replace the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, with a simple civil servant from the office , Jeffrey Clark, more complacent with Donald Trump’s alternate reality.
The lawyer was ready to defend the false allegations of fraud to overturn the elections, even if the United States Department of Justice, as of December 2020, was certain that the accusations of corruption of the presidential ballot, promoted by Donald Trump, were unfounded. The threat of massive resignations at the Attorney General’s office will have partly helped to avoid the materialization of this scenario.
“Who is Jeff Clark, asked Illinois elected official Adam Kinzinger, a rare Republican to sit on this commission? An environmental lawyer with no relevant experience to run the entire Department of Justice. What was his qualification then? He was going to do whatever the president wanted him to do, including overturning free and fair democratic elections.”
Coincidentally, the FBI raided Mr. Clark’s Virginia residence on Wednesday as part of the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into conspiracies surrounding the attempt to overturn the November 2020 vote result. to illegally keep Donald Trump in the White House.
An embarrassing letter
While hoping to become the new attorney general, Mr. Clark was considering sending a letter to Georgia state officials falsely claiming that the prosecutor’s office had evidence of fraud and calling for the certification of Georgia’s victory to be rescinded. Joe Biden, in this state which switched to the Democratic camp during the presidential election.
The letter, of which the commission obtained a draft, was also to be sent to other key States. It was called a “suicide pact” by White House lawyer Pat Cipollone during an exchange with the ex-president, recounted Thursday by former acting assistant attorney general Richard Donoghue. “It will taint anyone who touches it. And we should stay away from this letter, which I never want to see again,” he said.
For nearly two hours, the commission of inquiry multiplied the testimonies demonstrating the way in which Donald Trump tried “to use the Department of Justice to advance his personal political program”, indicated the chairman of the parliamentary committee. It also highlighted the resistance of prosecutors to preserve a necessary independence in the face of an executive power suddenly becoming delusional and authoritarian.
At the helm, Richard Donoghue repeated having informed the ex-president that the Department of Justice could in no way interfere with the elections organized by the States. “That’s not what I’m asking you to do,” Trump told her then. “Just say that [le scrutin était] corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican members of Congress,” he added, according to the former assistant attorney’s testimony before the commission.
“Some have argued with the former president and the public that the election was fraudulent and stolen,” said Jeffrey Rosen, acting attorney general during Trump’s final weeks in office. “That view was wrong then and it is wrong now, and I hope our presence here today will help reaffirm that fact.”
The commission of inquiry completed a first series of public hearings on Thursday, which began on June 10. Two other sessions are scheduled for the month of July, said committee officials who hope to keep the public’s interest in the Republican conspiracy to overthrow the elections and the ex-president’s schemes to remain in power illegally after his defeat.
The revelations brought to light by this commission of inquiry, as disturbing as they may be, however, seem to have difficulty percolating within the Republican electorate.
The winners of more than 100 Republican primaries ahead of the midterm elections continue to claim that the party and the ex-president were victims of a fraudulent ballot, in contradiction with the facts, according to an analysis from the Washington Post.
In more than 170 races across the country, 149 of these voter-chosen candidates are even campaigning to tighten access to the polls and control of the ballot, despite a lack of evidence that widespread fraud has occurred in 2020.