WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump called on senior Justice Department officials to declare the 2020 election results “corrupt” on a phone call in December, according to handwritten notes from one of the interviewees.
The recordings of the December 27 call, released on Friday by the House Oversight Committee, underscore the efforts Trump has made to overturn election results and gain the support of law enforcement officials and other government leaders. Emails released last month reveal that in the final weeks of his presidency, Trump and his allies pressured the Department of Justice to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020, and the Department’s Inspector General is investigating, whether Ministry officials tried to undermine the results.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” Trump said, according to notes from Richard Donoghue, a senior Justice Department official who was on the call.
The pressure is all the more remarkable when, just weeks earlier, Trump’s own Attorney General William Barr said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have overturned the results.
The December 27 call came just days after Barr’s resignation, leaving Rosen storming the building during the tumultuous final weeks of the administration, including the January 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol, in which pro-Trump loyalists stormed the building , who assumed responsibility for the department when Congress approved the election results.
“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directed our nation’s chief law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” said committee chair Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat , in a opinion.
She said the committee had started planning interviews with witnesses. The Justice Department authorized six witnesses to appear before the panel earlier this week, citing the public interest in the “extraordinary events” of these past few weeks.
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