Let’s be clear about this. Trump tried to steal the election, in many ways. More details are coming out about one of those ways and how pervasive it was, and how close it came to fruition. In a prior post I detailed how Trump pressured the Acting Attorney General (Jeffrey Rosen) and his Assistant Richard Donoghue to lie. Trump told them, “Just Say The Election Was Corrupt & Leave The Rest To Me.” We now know what Trump would have done with that lie.
The day after that call Jeffrey Clark, the Trump toady Trump threatened Rosen with replacing him with, drafted a letter for Rosen and Donoghue to sign. The letter was intended to be sent from the DOJ to the Governor of Georgia, The Georgia House Leader and Georgia Senate Leader. You can review the letter HERE.
First the letter states the lie that Rosen and Donoghue had told Trump the day before was a lie. The letter falsely declares to these state officials that the DOJ has “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the State of Georgia.” As Rosen and Donoghue had told Trump the day before that simply was not true. As Attorney General Barr had said just days before, they had found no evidence of any fraud that could impact the results of the election.
From there the letter goes on to state that for this reason the DOJ recommends that the Georgia legislature convene in special session to reverse the results of the election and appoint a new slate of electors for Trump. The letter spends considerable time presenting a dubious claim that doing so is Constitutional.
The letter failed. Donoghue quickly wrote a memo stating:
“There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this.” While it maybe true that the Department ‘is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President’ (something we typically would not state publicly) the investigations that I am aware of relate to suspicions of misconduct that are of such a small scale that they simply would not impact the outcome of the Presidential Election.”
That’s exactly what Donoghue and Rosen told Trump the day before. Rosen later confirmed that he also would not sign the proposed letter.
But what if they had gone along? Every American should ponder that question. Trump was willing to lie to stay in power. Trump was willing to order his subordinates to lie to stay in power. To stay in power Trump was willing to threaten to fire those subordinates if they didn’t lie as he directed them to do.
A corrupt President using corruption to corruptly stay in power was one of our Founders greatest fears. It happened.
When all that failed Trump had but one last desperate act to try to stay in power. That played out on January 6th, an event he and his allies arranged.
