Trump to acting AG, according to aide’s notes: ‘Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me’
"10 Trump election lies his own officials called false [...]Richard Donoghue, who served as principal associate deputy attorney general and then as acting deputy attorney general, also testified that claims of major fraud were untrue – and that he told Trump directly: “I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.’” P - Jeffrey Rosen, who served as deputy attorney general and then briefly, after Barr’s resignation in December 2020, as acting attorney general, said that when Trump would cite a supposed election impropriety, claiming that “people are telling me this” or “I heard this” or “I saw on television,” they could correct him: “We were in a position to say, ‘Our people already looked at that. And we know that you’re getting bad information. That’s – that’s not correct. It’s been demonstrated to be incorrect from our point of view. It’s been debunked.”"
Insert: The Beat With Ari Melber 7/25/23
By Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey July 31, 2021 at 8:09 p.m. EDT
Then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen at the White House on Sept. 26, 2020. (Jabin Botsford/ The Washington Post)
President Donald Trump pressed senior Justice Department officials in late 2020 to “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and Republican lawmakers, according to stunning handwritten notes that illustrate how far the president was willing to go to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.
The notes, taken by Justice Department official Richard Donoghue, were released to Congress this week and made public Friday — further evidence of the personal pressure campaign Trump waged as he sought to stay in the White House.
In one Dec. 27 conversation, according to the written account, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen told Trump that the Justice Department “can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election.”
The president replied that he understood but wanted the agency to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” according to the notes written by Donoghue, a participant in the discussion.
The documents show the extent to which senior Justice Department officials “were on a knife’s edge” in late 2020 as Trump sought to prevent Biden from becoming president, said David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official.
“These notes reveal that a sitting president, defeated in a free and fair election, personally and repeatedly pressured Justice Department leaders to help him foment a coup in a last-ditch attempt to cling to power,” Laufman said. “And that should shock the conscience of every American, regardless of political persuasion.”
He credited Rosen and Donoghue with devising “a mechanism to allow Trump to vent and spew his desired schemes to enlist their help to overturn the election without undertaking any course of action that would have facilitated that scheme.”
Donoghue also took notes on a meeting he participated in with White House officials two days after the Dec. 27 phone call. In that meeting, Trump officials repeatedly pressed the Justice Department to pursue various unfounded theories of election manipulation.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the Oversight Committee, said the notes “show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency.”
A lawyer for Rosen declined to comment, and a lawyer for Donoghue did not respond to a request for comment.
“The corrupt and highly partisan House Democrats who run the House Oversight Committee yesterday released documents — including court filings dealing with the rigged election of 2020 — that they dishonestly described as attempting to overturn the election,” Trump said in a statement Saturday. “In fact, it is just the opposite. The documents were meant to uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote.”
Some of the notes taken by Justice Department official Richard Donoghue during a phone call with President Donald Trump. (House Committee on Oversight and Reform)
The president and Rosen discussed Trump’s claims of voter fraud at other times as well, according to people familiar with the discussions.
In the calls, Rosen was generally noncommittal, hearing the president out while not promising to take any specific action in response, these people said. His attempts to change the subject were mostly unsuccessful.
“Trump was absolutely obsessed about it,” one person with knowledge of the calls said.
Others close to Trump were also pressing the Justice Department to consider dubious claims of vote tampering.Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, at times forwarded public claims of potential voter fraud to Justice Department officials, which some officials found exasperating, according to previously released emails. Meadows’s defenders have said he was just letting the department know about possible instances of illegality.
Donoghue’s notes show the degree to which the president was personally involved in such efforts, however, and the ways in which Justice Department officials walked a tightrope of listening to him while not taking any concrete actions they considered unethical or partisan.
The notes also say that Trump suggested to Rosen that he might be replaced at the helm of the Justice Department and even dropped the name of his possible successor.
“We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election,” Trump said, according to the notes. “People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership.”
The president was ultimately dissuaded from firing Rosen after a high-stakes meeting with those involved, those people said.
Clark, whom Trump had appointed to lead the environment and natural resources division and who later led the civil division, has denied that he devised a plan to oust Rosen or that he formed “recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the Internet.”
Donoghue’s notes show that Trump repeatedly brought up unsubstantiated tales of voter fraud in various states, which the Justice Department officials told him were not true.
“You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do,” Trump responded, according to the notes. He also said people are angry and “blaming DOJ + for inaction.”
Former president Donald Trump welcomed the release of the notes “if it gets more attention on the election,” one adviser said. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The president urged the nation’s top law enforcement official to aggressively investigate Biden’s son Hunter, according to the notes, which recount the president saying: “You figure out what to do w/ H. Biden — people will criticize the DOJ if he’s not investigated for real.”
Justice Department officials have been conducting a long-running investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances, but no charges have been filed.
Trump and his lawyers could have sought to block the release of Donoghue’s notes to Congress. There were days of discussion among Trump advisers about whether to do so, one adviser said, but the former president did not believe that the notes showed anything problematic, even though some of his advisers feared that the disclosures would be damaging.
“If it gets more attention on the election, he welcomes it,” this adviser said.
At least some of the former Justice Department officials with knowledge of the phone conversations had privately hoped that Trump would seek to block the sharing of the notes, to prevent those former officials from having to testify on Capitol Hill about the exchanges, said people familiar with their thinking. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
In a statement revealing the content of the notes Friday, Maloney said that her committee “has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former President’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay.”
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department, and is the author of "October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election." He was part of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 and 2022. In 2017 he was a co-finalist for the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting. Twitter
Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal. Twitter
Even in listing 21 lies, the 45-page indictment does not come close to capturing the entirety of Trump’s massive catalogue of false claims about the election. ..https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/12/politics/analysis-trump-election-lies-blog-post-presidency/index.html But the list is illustrative nonetheless – highlighting the breadth of election-related topics Trump was dishonest about, the large number of states his election dishonesty spanned, and, critically, his willingness to persist in privately and publicly making dishonest assertions even after they had been debunked to him directly.
'Here is the list of 21.
1. The lie that fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, that Trump “had actually won,” and that the election was “stolen.” (Pages 1 and 40-41 of the indictment)
Trump’s claim of a stolen election whose winner was determined by massive fraud was (and continues to be) his overarching lie about the election. The indictment asserts that Trump knew as early as 2020 that his narrative was false – and had been told as such by numerous senior officials in his administration and allies outside the federal government – but persisted in deploying it anyway, including on January 6 itself.
2. The lie that fake pro-Trump Electoral College electors in seven states were legitimate electors. (Pages 5 and 26)
The indictment alleges that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “organized” the phony slates of electors and then “caused” the slates to be transmitted to Vice President Mike Pence and other government officials to try to get them counted on January 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes.
3. The lie that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have affected the outcome of the election. (Pages 6 and 27)
Attorney General William Barr and other top Justice Department officials had told Trump that his claims of major fraud had proved to be untrue. But the indictment alleges that Trump still sought to have the Justice Department “make knowingly false claims of election fraud to officials in the targeted states through a formal letter under the Acting Attorney General’s signature, thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government and attempting to improperly influence the targeted states to replace legitimate Biden electors with the Defendant’s.”
4. The lie that Pence had the power to reject Biden’s electoral votes. (Pages 6, 32-38)
Pence had repeatedly and correctly told Trump that he did not have the constitutional or legal right to send electoral votes back to the states as Trump wanted. The indictment notes that Trump nonetheless repeatedly declared that Pence could do so – first in private conversations and White House meetings, then in tweets on January 5 and January 6, then in Trump’s January 6 speech in Washington at a rally before the riot – in which Trump, angry at Pence, allegedly inserted the false claim into his prepared text even after advisors had managed to temporarily get it removed. 5. The lie that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” (Page 36)
The indictment alleges that the day before the riot, Trump “approved and caused” his campaign to issue a false statement saying Pence agreed with him about having the power to reject electoral votes – even though Trump knew, from a one-on-one meeting with Pence hours prior, that Pence continued to firmly disagree.
6. The lie that Georgia had thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead people. (Pages 8 and 16)
The indictment notes that Georgia’s top elections official – Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – a republican – explained to Trump in a phone call on January 2, 2021 that this claim was false, but that Trump repeated it in his January 6 rally speech anyway. Raffensperger said in the phone call and then in a January 6 letter to Congress that just two potential dead-voter cases had been discovered in the state; Raffensperger said in late 2021 that the total had been updated and stood at four.
7. The lie that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters. (Pages 8 and 20)
The indictment notes that Trump’s acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue had both told him that this claim was false, but he kept making it anyway – including in the January 6 rally speech. 8. The lie that there had been a suspicious “dump” of votes in Detroit, Michigan. (Pages 9 and 17)
The indictment notes that Barr, the attorney general, told Trump on December 1, 2020 that this was false – as CNN and others had noted, supposedly nefarious “dumps” Trump kept talking about were merely ballots being counted and added to the public totals as normal – but that Trump still repeated the false claim in public remarks the next day. And Barr wasn’t the only one to try to dissuade Trump from this claim. The indictment also notes that Michigan’s Republican Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, had told Trump in an Oval Office meeting on November 20, 2020 that Trump had lost the state “not because of fraud” but because Trump had “underperformed with certain voter populations.”
9. The lie that Nevada had tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud. (Page 9)
The indictment notes that Nevada’s top elections official – Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, also a Republican – had publicly posted a “Facts vs. Myths” document explaining that Nevada judges had rejected such claims.
10. The lie that more than 30,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. (Pages 9 and 11)
The indictment notes that Trump put the number at “over 36,000” in his January 6 speech – even though, the indictment says, his own campaign manager “had explained to him that such claims were false” and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who had supported Trump in the election, “had issued a public statement that there was no evidence of substantial fraud in Arizona.”
11. The lie that voting machines in swing states had switched votes from Trump to Biden. (Page 9)
This is a reference to false conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines, which Trump kept repeating long after it was thoroughly debunked by his own administration’s election cybersecurity security arm and many others. The indictment says, “The Defendant’s Attorney General, Acting Attorney General, and Acting Deputy Attorney General all had explained to him that this was false, and numerous recounts and audits had confirmed the accuracy of voting machines.”
12. The lie that Dominion machines had been involved in “massive election fraud.” (Page 12)
The indictment notes that Trump, on Twitter, promoted a lawsuit filed by an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as lawyer Sidney Powell, that alleged “massive election fraud” involving Dominion – even though, the indictment says, Trump privately acknowledged to advisors that the claims were “unsupported” and told them Powell sounded “crazy.”
13. The lie that “a substantial number of non-citizens, non-residents, and dead people had voted fraudulently in Arizona.” (Page 10)
The indictment alleges that Trump and an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, made these baseless claims on a November 22, 2020 phone call with Bowers; the indictment says Giuliani never provided evidence and eventually said, at a December 1, 2020 meeting with Bowers, “words to the effect of, ‘We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.”
14. The lie that Fulton County, Georgia elections workers had engaged in “ballot stuffing.” (Pages 13 and 14)
This is the long-debunked lie – which Trump has continued to repeat in 2023 – that a video had caught two elections workers in Atlanta breaking the law. The workers were simply doing their jobs, and, as the indictment notes, they were cleared of wrongdoing by state officials in 2020 – but Trump continued to make the claims even after Raffensperger and Justice Department officials directly and repeatedly told him they were unfounded.
15. The lie that thousands of out-of-state voters cast ballots in Georgia. (Page 16)
The indictment notes that Trump made this claim on his infamous January 2, 2021 call with Raffensperger, whose staff responded that the claim was inaccurate. An official in Raffensberger’s office explained to Trump that the voters in question had authentically moved back to Georgia and legitimately cast ballots. 16. The lie that Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable,” to address Trump’s claims about a “‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.” (Page 16)
In fact, contrary to this Trump tweet the day after the call, Raffensperger and his staff had addressed and debunked all of these false Trump claims.
17. The lie that there was substantial fraud in Wisconsin and that the state had tens of thousands of unlawful votes. (Page 21)
False and false. But the indictment notes that Trump made the vague fraud claim in a tweet on December 21, 2020, after the state Supreme Court upheld Biden’s win, and repeated the more specific claim about tens of thousands of unlawful votes in the January 6 speech.
18. The lie that Wisconsin had more votes counted than it had actual voters. (Page 21)
This, like Trump’s similar claim about Pennsylvania, is not true. But the indictment alleges that Trump raised the claim in a December 27, 2020 conversation with acting attorney general Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Donoghue, who informed him that it was false.
19. The lie that the election was “corrupt.” (Page 28)
The indictment alleges that when acting attorney general Rosen told Trump on the December 27, 2020 call that the Justice Department couldn’t and wouldn’t change the outcome of the election, Trump responded, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” (Deputy attorney general Donoghue memorialized the reported Trump remark in his handwritten notes, which CNN reported on in 2021 and which were subsequently published by the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot.)
20. The lie that Trump won every state by hundreds of thousands of votes. (Page 34)
The indictment says that, at a January 4, 2021 meeting intended to convince Pence to unlawfully reject Biden’s electoral votes and send them back to swing-state legislatures, Pence took notes describing Trump as saying, “Bottom line-won every state by 100,000s of votes.” This was, obviously, false even if Trump was specifically talking about swing states won by Biden rather than every state in the nation.
21. The lie that Pennsylvania “want[s] to recertify.” (Page 38)
Trump made this false claim in his January 6 speech. In reality, some Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania had expressed a desire to at least delay the congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory – but the state’s Democratic governor and top elections official, who actually had election certification power in the state, had no desire to recertify Biden’s legitimate win.
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