NPR interview with Katie Benner, reporter who broke the Trump/DOJ/Jeffrey Clark story

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https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1027039078&live=1




This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Donald Trump's attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and declare himself the winner are being investigated by the Department of Justice's inspector general, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. My guest, New York Times reporter Katie Benner, broke the story that led two investigations. That article revealed that Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department's Civil Division, tried to get DOJ leaders to falsely claim that investigations into voter fraud in Georgia cast doubt on the Electoral College results. She also reported that Clark had plotted with President Trump to oust the acting attorney general, replace him with Clark and use the Justice Department's power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

Benner covers the Justice Department for the Times and has been continuing to report on these investigations into Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election and what she describes as the former president's desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. We're going to talk about what has been revealed so far, who else is involved and what the legal consequences might be.

Benner won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for a contribution to the Times' reporting on sexual harassment. Her article was about the culture of harassment in Silicon Valley. We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Later in the day, Benner reported that a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, had just told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a closed-door session that his abrupt resignation on January 4 had been prompted by a warning from DOJ officials that Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia.

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