Trump Pressed Justice Department to Go Directly to Supreme Court to Overturn Election Results
Source: WSJ
In his last weeks in office, former President Donald Trump considered moving to replace the acting attorney general with another official ready to pursue unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, and he pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Biden’s victory, people familiar with the matter said.
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Senior department officials, including Mr. Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding that there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and that the federal government had no legal interest in whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden won the presidency, some of these people said. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Patrick Philbin, also opposed Mr. Trump’s idea, which was promoted by his outside attorneys, these people said.
“He wanted us, the United States, to sue one or more of the states directly in the Supreme Court,” a former administration official said. “The pressure got really intense” after a lawsuit Texas filed in the Supreme Court against four states Mr. Biden won was dismissed on Dec. 11, the official said. An outside lawyer working for Mr. Trump drafted a brief the then-president wanted the Justice Department to file, people familiar with the matter said, but officials refused.
After his Supreme Court plan got nowhere, Mr. Trump explored another plan—replacing Mr. Rosen as acting attorney general with Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally in the department who had expressed a willingness to use the department’s power to help the former president continue his unsuccessful legal battles contesting the election results, these people said.
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Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-pressed-to-change-justice-department-leadership-to-boost-his-voter-fraud-claims-11611434369
Note -- this is NEW info in a WSJ exclusive this evening.
This is what Trump was trying BEFORE he and a DOJ lawyer came up with the insane plan the NYT reported on last night, the plan to oust the Acting AG and then try to get the Georgia state legislators to flip the state to Trump.
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