The report of more interference efforts come as the Senate makes plans for its impeachment trial.
In the final weeks of his presidency, former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn state election results in Georgia by pressuring officials to “find” votes for him. And according to a new report from the New York Times, Trump’s efforts extended beyond that: He also contemplated replacing the acting US attorney general with one more sympathetic to his efforts to force a change in the Georgia results. The Times’ Katie Benner reports that Trump and Jeffrey Clark, a Department of Justice lawyer in charge of the civil division, devised a plan that would have seen the Department of Justice working to improperly keep Trump in office by replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who had refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to undermine election results, with Clark. A rash of DOJ officials, briefed on the plan via conference call on January 3, threatened to resign if that occurred, according to the Times report. That threat, along with a contentious meeting between Rosen, Clark, and Trump in which each DOJ official made their case to the president reportedly dissuaded Trump from replacing Rosen in the end. But had the effort gone ahead, the Justice Department would have likely become embroiled in the effort to overturn the election, giving it a legitimacy and legal backing it had failed to gain, following the failure of dozens of lawsuits that falsely alleged election irregularities. One former Justice Department official called the effort to replace Rosen “an attempted coup at the Justice Dept. — fomented by the President of the United States” on Twitter Friday. For his part, Clark has denied that any plan to fire Rosen existed, and told the Times that he had merely provided counsel to the president. “My practice is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims,” he said.
