Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for the Justice Department’s internal watchdog to investigate former President Trump over a bombshell report released Friday that said he tried to oust his former acting attorney general in a plot to overturn the election results.
“Unconscionable a Trump Justice Department leader would conspire to subvert the people’s will,” Schumer tweeted. “The Justice Dept Inspector General must launch an investigation into this attempted sedition now.”
Schumer added that the Senate will “move forward” with an impeachment trial into Trump over his role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The trial is set to begin the week of Feb. 8.
The remarks come a day after The New York Times published a bombshell report indicating that Trump tried to remove his acting attorney general in a bid to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia.
The plan involved replacing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer at the Justice Department who was seen as more amenable to a plan to pressure Georgia politicians to overturn the results of the race there. Rosen had refused to support Trump’s evidence-challenged claims that voter fraud had cost him the election.
The plot fell apart only after a group of Department of Justice officials uncovered the plan and threatened to resign en masse if Rosen was ousted.
The report was just the latest revelation of the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election. Trump had railed against his loss to President Biden, citing unsubstantiated voter fraud claims, and has looked to overturn it by filing dozens of lawsuits, pressuring state lawmakers to send his backers to the Electoral College instead of Biden electors and even leaning on former Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s victory.