Jan. 6 committee connects two strands of Trump’s effort to retain power
Analysis by Philip Bump
National correspondent
June 23, 2022 at 5:09 p.m. EDT
As it turns out, though, there was apparently a link between Clark’s letter and Eastman’s plot.
Shortly before the committee went into a brief recess on Thursday, Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed that connection.
“The committee has also learned that Mr. Clark was working with another attorney at the department named Ken Klukowski, who drafted this letter to Georgia with Mr. Clark,” Cheney said. Klukowski, she said, had started work at the department Dec. 15, just over a month before Trump’s administration would end. There, Klukowski was assigned to work under Clark.
But “Mr. Klukowski also worked with John Eastman,” Cheney said, describing the attorney as “one of the primary architects of President Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.”
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Cheney also presented an email sent after Klukowski had joined the Justice Department by Trump ally Ken Cuccinelli, at the time acting deputy secretary of homeland security. It suggested Eastman and Klukowski brief Vice President Mike Pence on the plan to upend the election results. In the message, there’s even a reference to the sensitivity of including Klukowski, given his new position at the department.
“This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election,” Cheney concluded, “and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”
In other words, Klukowski appears to draw two different parts of Trump’s effort to retain power — overhaul the Justice Department to focus on claims of fraud and get legislatures to sign off on alternate slates of electors — into one unified plot. It wasn’t just Clark hoping to publicly elevate the idea that something sketchy happened in Georgia. It may, instead, have been that Clark’s letter was an attempt to use the Justice Department to force Georgia’s legislature into enacting Eastman’s scheme.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/23/jan-6-committee-connects-two-strands-trumps-effort-retain-power/
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