Crickets from Trump, and his unhingery on blaming the US women’s soccer team loss on kneeling during the national anthem shows more of the usual deflection.
The Jeffrey Clark draft letter demonstrated an overt act. Some beer halls only serve draughts.
Sadly the history of prior “(----) night-massacres” where officials threatened to or did resign in multiples, were the only thing keeping the US from a bloodless coup.
The canaries are beginning to sing as Trump descends the mine shaft. Former acting AG Jeffrey Rosen reached out to the DOJ IG to cooperate with his inquiry & gave them hours of testimony.
"[ROSEN] discovered that [Jeffrey] Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Trump – about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s victory.”
That is the unnerving picture that is only beginning to fully emerge of what was happening behind the scenes as Trump, enraged by his loss, schemed to overturn clear election results with the connivance of not only top White House aides but also senior officials at the Justice Department who were maneuvering around their chain of command to bolster Trump’s efforts.
Which raises the most disturbing question: What if? What if the senior Trump-installed officials at the Justice Department, notably acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, had been more willing to put loyalty to Trump over the rule of law? What happens, God forbid, next time, when the outcome may be further muddied thanks to changed state laws shifting power from election officials to partisan legislators?
www.washingtonpost.com/...
What the letter makes clear is top figures inside the Trump administration were willing to make patently implausible legal and factual arguments against the validity of Joe Biden’s electoral victory — not because those arguments had any merit but because they provided just enough of a fig leaf to keep President Donald Trump in power. Put another way, the letter drives home that it wasn’t just the president’s supporters outside the administration who were willing to resort to extreme measures to prevent the peaceful transition of power — the call for a coup was coming from inside the house.
The Dec. 28 letter, which Jeffrey Clark — at the time the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — apparently hoped to get signed by acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, included debunked claims about alleged improprieties in the counting of votes in Georgia. Clark apparently hoped to use those claims as the basis for the Justice Department to formally urge the Georgia legislature to call itself into special session (never mind that Georgia law doesn’t allow such a maneuver), certify a competing slate of electors for Trump (never mind that the deadline for such a move had passed) and thereby give congressional Republicans a justification not just for contesting Biden’s Georgia electors at the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 but for seeking to have Georgia’s electoral votes counted for Trump.
www.washingtonpost.com/...