On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an extensive report on how former President Donald Trump, along with top lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ), tried to overturn the presidential election last year.
According to the report, Trump directly urge DOJ nine times to undermine the outcome by pressuring officials to investigate any potential election fraud. The report was made based on statements from top former DOJ officials.
The report comes just a few days after a group of top legal officials issued a joint complaint to the D.C. Court of Appeals’ disciplinary panel requesting a probe of Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) official, for allegedly attempting to use his position to overturn the presidential election result last year.
“Mr. Clark made false statements about the integrity of the election in a concerted effort to disseminate an official statement of the United States Department of Justice that the election results in multiple states were unreliable,” reads the complaint. “While his conduct mirrored that of other lawyers who have been sanctioned for false statements, they operated on a considerably more dangerous scale with commensurately greater risk to our democracy.”
The committee report reached a similar conclusion. “Clark’s proposal to wield DOJ’s power to override the already-certified popular vote reflected a stunning distortion of DOJ’s authority: DOJ protects ballot access and ballot integrity, but has no role in determining which candidate won a particular election,” the committee’s report reads.
