REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 TRUMP CONTINUES TRYING TO STEAL THE ELECTION

 

                …A picture of the former president while in the White House on January 4^th

 

Trump has tried for years to sell “election fraud” to the American public.

 

It is still very important that the general public understand the following, even if they have to hear it over and over again.  That being: that “Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by 7 million actual votes and 74 electoral votes.”

We are just now learning that when that was announced, it was the beginning of the next phase of Trump’s battle to steal Joe Biden’s victory by any means possible.

We all know that Donald Trump had spent the last four years laying the groundwork and sowing doubt about the security of U.S. elections.  You will remember that he focused his fraud claims on the increase of mail-in ballots and he insisted that would bring an avalanche of fraudulent voting.  Of course, he made this claim without a shred of evidence.

However, this claim did allow the House Republican Caucus to vote to block the counting of electoral votes from two of the states.  That was precisely the outcome that the January 6^th rioters hoped to effect.

We have since learned that Trump’s most direct effort to steal the election actually unfolded over the last few days of 2020.

ABC News has recently published a letter circulated by the then-acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, a man named Jeffrey Clark.  The letter was addressed to Georgia Governor. Brian Kemp (R) and to Georgia state legislative leaders.  The letter dated Dec. 28 claimed that the department was “investigating various irregularities” in the presidential contest and that it had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.”

The letter went on to suggest that an alternative slate of electors, that is of course, electors for Trump, that might be accepted on Jan. 6, should the state legislature demand that happen.  Understanding that Kemp had already risen to the defense of the results in the state, Clark claimed in the letter that the legislature could simply call itself into session to make that determination.

It was, in other words, a road map to overthrowing the will of the state’s voters. The amount of detail given to the mechanism for handing the electors to Trump, was matched by the shortage of any evidence as to what the alleged “irregularities” were in the state.

The acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, rejected the letter out of hand.  This was a well-founded decision that prevented a dicey situation from getting worse.

Donoghue’s lengthy response, one probably written with an eye toward it eventually being read by any number of external eyes, made all of the points you might expect. The purported “irregularities” amounted to nothing more than a few irrelevant questions about individual votes.  They were concerns “that are of such a small scale that they simply would not impact the outcome of the Presidential Election,” Donoghue wrote. Nothing he knew of, he added, would amount to “significant concerns” elsewhere that would similarly call the results into question.  “more importantly,” added, “I do not think the Department’s role should include making recommendations to a State legislature about how they should meet their Constitutional obligation to appoint Electors.” In other words: “It is not the Justice Department’s place to tell states how to overturn election results.”  Sending the letter, he concluded, it was “not even within the realm of possibility.”

By itself, this back-and-forth is probably without precedent. But we see just how desperately, Trump was scrambling to gain a toehold in his efforts to upend the Biden presidency.

Remember, this was after every state had already certified its results, which was something that Trump and his allies tried desperately to prevent, and they came close in Michigan.  This was after the electors had met Dec. 14 and finalized their formal votes to be transmitted to D.C.  In other words, there was no real way for the election results to shift. So Trump and his allies tried to gin up something exceptional, with a particular focus on Georgia.

The attorney general who served Trump so loyally in the second half of his administration, William Barr, left the administration on Dec. 23, elevating Rosen to that position.  Barr had already publicly rejected the idea that rampant fraud had occurred, earning Trump’s ire.  Barr’s departure was announced Dec. 14, and the Trump’s team wasted no time in pressuring Rosen on their fraud claims. Trump’s assistant sent Rosen a document that afternoon purporting to show fraud in Michigan. On Dec. 15, the president called Rosen into the Oval Office to insist that he file legal arguments claiming that the election was stolen. Of course, Rosen refused.

On Dec. 27, with Rosen now running the Justice Department, Trump called the acting attorney general. Notes from the call taken by Donoghue, that were released last week, they show the thrust of the conversation.

Trump suggested that Rosen's team “may not be following the internet the way I do,” which was certainly true, given that Trump was busily elevating many obviously unreliable online claims to his millions of followers on social media. (While Trump still had access to social media.)  Trump needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t & won’t snap its fingers to change the outcome of the election, it doesn’t work that way,” Rosen replied, according to Donoghue's notes.

“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump said in response, “just say that the election was corrupt & leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.”

That latter assurance was probably centered on Trump’s looking forward to lawmakers challenging the vote on Jan. 6, as they in fact did. (Trump had also already begun encouraging his supporters to come to D.C. that day, promising in a tweet on Dec. 19 that the day “will be wild!”  That turned out to be so true!) But Trump clearly felt that the lawmakers would need something more substantive in hand before the day arrived.

On Dec. 29, for example, Trump’s assistant sent Rosen and Donoghue a draft lawsuit the president hoped would be filed with the Supreme Court. It mirrored a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas that the court had already declined to hear.  The trump draft was also declined.

The day after the “just say the election was corrupt” call, Clark circulated his letter that just said exactly that. But Clark’s letter was almost certainly not something that occurred independent of Trump. In fact, Clark was introduced to Trump by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and Perry had begun talking with Trump directly. (Perry at another point also forwarded Donoghue a document detailing what were debunked claims about fraud in his state.) Trump began speculating about tossing Rosen out in favor of the more acceptable Clark, something Clark obviously favored.

However, on Dec. 31, Rosen and Donoghue met with Clark to tell him to back off his false claims about the election, they were unaware that Clark already had Trump’s ear.

On Jan. 2, Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and said members of his team just “need more time to uncover the big numbers” of fraudulent ballots, a search that still remains unanswered. He accused Raffensperger of violating the law by not taking steps to acknowledge “Trump’s imaginary fraudulent ballots.”

“All I want to do is this,” Trump said. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”  Then he said, “ just leave the rest to me!”

The next day, Clark told Rosen that he was going to be made acting attorney general by Trump. That led to a difficult meeting in the Oval Office involving all three men in which Trump weighed making such a switch to advance his fraud claims.  A number of senior Justice Department officials had promised to resign should it happen, which the New York Times credits with helping preserve Rosen’s job. But that outcome was by no means certain at the time. Replacing Rosen would probably have meant a quick issuance of Clark’s letter about “investigating various irregularities” in the election.  In addition, it would be a public rationalization for Georgia’s Republican-led legislature to act in support of Trump’s effort to snatch away the state’s electoral votes.

With Jan. 6 approaching, Trump continued to try to shake free those Georgia’s electoral votes. The U.S. attorney for Georgia, a Trump appointee, he resigned on Jan. 4 after receiving a call spurred by the White House complaining about the appointee’s failure to launch investigations of the alleged fraud.  But it was soon too late to redirect the vote-counting on Jan. 6, save for the efforts of those pro-Trump rioters.

That does not mean the effort has stopped. Trump continues to try to gin up doubt about the election results.  This is despite the lack of any mechanism for being reinstated as president.

Even today, Trump’s approach is the same as it was seven months ago: He just wants to get someone, somewhere, to say that fraud did happen, and he should be reinstated.  But there is, and has been no evidence of fraud.

As I have said before, we haven’t seen the end of this battle.

Copyright G. Ater 2021.