New Trump emails show his election bullying reached DOJ's leaders
There was no guarantee that Trump's pressure campaign would fail.
By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
The Department of Justice has gotten a lot of grief lately for the actions it took under the Trump administration. But a cache of emails released Tuesday morning show that of all the inanity going around, DOJ officials did at least one thing right: They refused to entertain then-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The over 200 pages of emails the House Oversight Committee has gathered illustrate that Trump and his final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, spent the weeks before Congress certified Joe Biden as the next president badgering and haranguing Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, and his acting deputy, Richard Donoghue, to back Trump’s conspiracy-laden machinations. Neither of them was willing to do so — something we have to give them credit for, given who was doing the asking.
Meadows’ messages drew the most scorn from the pair. “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below,” Rosen wrote Jan. 1. “At least it’s better than the last one, but that doesn’t say much,” Donoghue responded. That day, Donoghue called a YouTube video that Meadows had forwarded “pure insanity.”
Even more concerning is a draft version of a brief that Trump wanted the Department of Justice to file with the Supreme Court. Much of it was almost identical to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s laughable brief to the Supreme Court.
In his filing, Paxton alleged that his states’ voters were injured because four states that Trump lost had “illegally” changed how they run their elections during the pandemic. While inherently illogical, the petition gained favor among Republicans, with 17 state attorneys general and over 100 Republican members of Congress signing on in support.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Thursday, June 17th 2021 at 6:28PM
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