Did Genet and Washington Ever Meet Again After the Plot Failed
Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Chaser General
Trying to find another avenue to push button his baseless ballot claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Section's top leaders listened in stunned silence this calendar month: I of their peers, they were told, had devised a program with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department's power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising means to cast doubt on the election results and to eternalize Mr. Trump'due south continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president's entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was almost to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and supersede him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you exercise if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?
The answer was unanimous. They would resign.
Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in identify, computing that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse whatsoever attending on his groundless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump's conclusion came just after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White Business firm meeting that 2 officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump's reality bear witness "The Apprentice," albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.
The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president's long-running effort to concoction the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He likewise pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including ane who would look into Rule Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump's allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This account of the section's final days under Mr. Trump'due south leadership is based on interviews with iv former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.
Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies simply did not specify, adding that he could non discuss whatsoever conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers because of "the strictures of legal privilege." "Senior Justice Department lawyers, non uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties," he said. "All my official communications were consistent with law."
Mr. Clark categorically denied that he devised any programme to oust Mr. Rosen, or to codify recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the net. "My practise is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims," Mr. Clark said. "There was a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president. Information technology is unfortunate that those who were role of a privileged legal conversation would annotate in public almost such internal deliberations, while also distorting whatever discussions."
Mr. Clark also noted that he was the pb signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.
Mr. Trump declined to annotate. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate "rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years."
The adviser added that "whatever assertion to the opposite is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken." Mr. Clark agreed and said that "legal privileges" prevented him from divulging specifics regarding the conversation.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, every bit did Mr. Rosen.
When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Chaser General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might permit Mr. Rosen a brusk reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. Afterwards all, Mr. Barr would exist around for some other calendar week.
Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Part the next twenty-four hour period. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies' lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to engage special counsels to investigate non but unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, only also Dominion, the voting machines house.
(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into iv federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)
Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would brand decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The section had investigated voting irregularities and plant no bear witness of widespread fraud.
Merely Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen later on the coming together — in telephone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had non found testify that supported conspiracy theories nearly the election that some of his personal lawyers had consort. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.
Equally Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney full general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania political leader and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the ballot results.
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Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil segmentation in September and was also the head of the department's environmental and natural resources partition.
Equally December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them considering they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the ballot. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the section to hold a news conference announcing that information technology was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.
Equally Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a country he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.Due south. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to notice bear witness for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump's lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might non exist tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
That chat and Mr. Trump's efforts to pressure level Georgia's Republican secretary of state to "find" him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.
Mr. Clark was too focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to transport to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden's win at that place.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark's proposal.
On New year's Eve, the trio met to hash out Mr. Clark's refusal to hew to the department'due south decision that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The side by side day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden'southward electoral victory.
Unbeknown to the acting attorney full general, Mr. Clark's timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, and so informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to supersede him with Mr. Clark, who could and then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on every bit his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.
Unwilling to stride down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear directly from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.
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Fifty-fifty as Mr. Clark'due south pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news bankrupt out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president's drastic bid to change the result in Georgia came into precipitous focus.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the caput of the Justice Section'southward role of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark's latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a belatedly-afternoon phone call with the section's remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark's efforts to supplant Mr. Rosen.
Mr. Rosen planned to shortly caput to the White House to hash out his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the grouping. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the then-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot Fifty. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president's order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.
The Clark plan, the officials ended, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of police force. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another equally they awaited Mr. Rosen'southward fate.
Around vi p.thou., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White Business firm with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark nowadays their arguments to him.
Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department'south remaining meridian officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark solitary at the department.
Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger non only anarchy at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.
After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark's program would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.
Mr. Rosen and his deputies ended they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden's victory, there would be little for them to practice until they left forth with Mr. Trump in two weeks.
They began to exhale days later on as the Balloter College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/jeffrey-clark-trump-justice-department-election.html
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