One of the things that makes Donald Trump a unique figure among U.S. presidents is that, in addition to basically being illiterate, he’s a rare combination of both corrupt as all get-out and batshit fucking crazy. For instance, while other one-term presidents might have had a difficult time accepting the loss, as far as we know, none of them believed they would be “reinstated“ at the White House months after their opponent was sworn in. To that end, there is no evidence that Bush, Carter, Pierce, Hoover, Taft, Harrison, Van Buren, or John Adams (or his son) invited their supporters to D.C. and encouraged them to sack the Capitol. And we can say with near-certainty that none of Trump’s fellow one-termers tried to get the Department of Justice to investigate a literally insane conspiracy theory that Italian satellites had altered ballots, as part of a campaign to get the agency to overturn the election. Which, yes, is a thing that actually happened.
According to documents released by the House Oversight Committee, which is probing the events leading up to January 6, between December 2020 and January 2021, Trump and his cronies repeatedly pressured DOJ officials to investigate absurd theories in the hopes of preventing Joe Biden from becoming president. On December 14 at 4:57 p.m., for instance, Trump’s assistant sent acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and DOJ official Richard Donoghue a document that claimed to show evidence of voter fraud in Michigan—which had been thrown out by a federal judge a week earlier. Two weeks later, per The New York Times, Trump sent another email to Rosen via his assistant that “included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court,” which argued, among other things, “that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.” Similar claims had also been thrown out by the court. During the same period, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was bombarding the Justice Department with equally ridiculous requests, including the one about Italian satellites.
Per CNN:
Other emails show Meadows pressuring the DOJ to investigate the fraud claims of Trump allies like Cleta Mitchell, the attorney who assisted Trump on his call pressuring Georgia election officials to “find” him votes. In a January 1 message, Meadows wrote that there were “allegations of signature match anomalies” in Fulton County and demanded Rosen have someone “engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation.” Rosen, clearly annoyed by these missives, forwarded the email to Donoghue, adding, “Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to the message below.” After Meadows sent Rosen a YouTube link re: the Italian satellites, Rosen forwarded it on to Donoghue, who wrote back, “Pure insanity.”
As the Times notes, the brief Trump wanted the DOJ to file with the Supreme Court “mirrored” a lawsuit from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton that the court had already rejected. But that didn’t stop a Trump ally who seemingly became singularly obsessed with convincing Rosen to put the full weight of the DOJ behind the matter:
In a statement, House Oversight Committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney said the documents “show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost.” On Tuesday, Maloney sent letters to Meadows, Donoghue, Clark, and other DOJ officials requesting their testimony before the committee as part of its investigation into the events leading up to the January insurrection.
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