In the waning days of his presidency, Donald Trump was desperate to get his Department of Justice to wage a long shot legal battle to overturn the 2020 election, according to a batch of emails from the Trump White House obtained by the House Oversight Committee.
In December 2020, Jeffrey Rosen became acting attorney general. Even before Rosen was sworn-in, Trump sent an email via his assistant that purported to contain proof that there was election fraud in Northern Michigan. Those fraud claims had already been dismissed by a federal judge.
Two weeks later, Trump’s assistant once again emailed Rosen, this time with a 54-page draft of a brief that Trump wanted the DOJ to file to the Supreme Court. It alleged that many states abandoned election security measures during the pandemic and Joe Biden’s win was therefore invalid. These claims had already been brought to the Supreme Court by Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Around the same time, Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, emailed Rosen asking him to examine if people associated with an Italian defense contractor weaponized satellite technology to compromise U.S. voting equipment from Europe. Meadows included a link to a YouTube video about the conspiracy theory.
Rosen forwarded that email to a deputy, who responded, “Pure insanity.”
Still, Rudy Giuliani, acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, wanted to meet with Rosen to discuss the Italian defense contractor.
Rosen resisted the requests. He emailed an associate, “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”
The emails released by the House Oversight Committee also show that Trump encouraged a coterie of lawyers pushing The Big Lie to reach out to Rosen, who rebuffed them.
Rosen’s pushback nearly cost him his job. Trump apparently maneuvered to replace Rosen with a DOJ official who was willing to force Georgia to throw out their election results. That plot was stymied when a number of high-ranking DOJ leaders threatened to resign.
But Byung Pak, then-U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, continued to face pressure from the Trump administration to investigate the election results in Fulton County. Pak resigned on January 3rd.
The emails “show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY).
Maloney received the emails from the DOJ. She has vowed to ask several Trump officials to testify about the political pressure placed on Rosen and his deputies.
“Those who aided or witnessed President Trump’s unlawful actions must answer the Committee’s questions about this attempted subversion of democracy. My Committee is committed to ensuring that the events leading to the violent January 6 insurrection are fully investigated,” she added.