Former President Trump sought to oust his acting attorney general in a bid to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia, according to a new bombshell report in The New York Times.
Trump reportedly planned to replace then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer at the Justice Department, in an effort to apply pressure to Georgia politicians to overturn the results of the race there. Rosen had refused to back Trump’s disputed claims that voter fraud had cost him the election, drawing the president’s ire.
Trump had also pressed Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate what he said were irregularities in the election, though he never provided any evidence for his claims. Among the investigations he wanted launched was one into Dominion Voting Systems, a company that made the election equipment Trump’s backers falsely said had ties with Venezuela to prevent Trump’s reelection.
The plot failed after a group of Department of Justice (DOJ) officials uncovered the plan and threatened to resign en masse if Trump and Clark followed through with it. Rosen stayed in his position for the remainder of the administration.
The Times’s report was based on four former Trump administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
Clark told the Times that the account was false, though he did not say what specifically the officials were mistaken about.
“Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”
Clark also noted he was a lead signatory on a request from the DOJ in December asking a federal court to toss a lawsuit meant to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the election results during Congress’s certification of the Electoral College.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.
Trump railed against the presidential election results in the final weeks of his administration, seemingly fixated on spurious allegations of widespread voter fraud. He focused much of his attention on Georgia, a state no Republican presidential candidate had lost since 1992 but where President Biden won by about 12,000 votes.