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Did Trump want FBI to probe if satellites manipulated votes? Here’s what new emails suggest
US President Donald Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows sent Jeffrey Rosen, then-acting attorney general, a YouTube link referencing an Italy conspiracy related to voter fraud.
The new emails from the US department of justice (DOJ) and White House officials show how then-President Donald Trump’s allies pressured Jeffrey Rosen, then-deputy attorney general, to consider baseless allegations of voter fraud and at the same time elevated him to lead the DOJ. Minutes after Trump’s staff started sending emails with phoney voter fraud information to Rosen, the Republican leader announced that the No. 2 at the DOJ would serve as acting attorney general, according to the new documents disclosed by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
On Tuesday, Carolyn B. Maloney, the chairperson of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, released new documents showing Trump’s efforts to pressure the DOJ to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The documents obtained by the committee show that in December 2020 and early January 2021, Trump, his chief of staff, and outside allies repeatedly put pressure on senior DOJ officials to advance unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, “with the apparent goal of keeping President Trump in power despite losing the 2020 election.”
“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” Maloney said in a statement.
On December 29, 2020, Trump’s White House assistant emailed Rosen, then-principal associate deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, and acting solicitor general Jeffrey Wall, attaching a draft legal brief to file in the Supreme Court. The draft complaint demanded that the Supreme Court “declare that the Electoral College votes cast” in six states that Trump lost “cannot be counted,” requesting the Court to order a “special election” for the outgoing president in those states.
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Emails further confirm that Trump met with Rosen, then-assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark, and other DOJ officials on December 31, 2020, and January 3, 2021. During these meetings, Trump reportedly pressured them to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to the committee. The documents have substantiated recent reports that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows pressured DOJ officials to investigate conspiracy theories.
Meadows emailed Rosen a translation of a document from an individual in Italy claiming to have “direct knowledge” of a plot by which American electoral data was changed in Italian facilities “in coordination with senior US intelligence officials (CIA)” and loaded onto “military satellites.” The individual claimed that the true data, as well as sources within the conservative wing of the Italian secret service, confirmed that Trump was “clearly the winner” of the 2020 presidential election.
Meadows sent Rosen a YouTube link referencing the Italy conspiracy. Rosen forwarded the email to Donoghue, who responded: “Pure insanity.”
Rosen then explained to Donoghue that he was asked to have the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) meet a person who, he learnt, was working with Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani. But the DOJ official refused the request.
