Former President Donald Trump pressed top Justice Department officials to declare the 2020 presidential election “corrupt” during his efforts to overturn the results.
In a phone call on Dec. 27, Trump repeated a variety of unproven claims of voter fraud to then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue. Donoghue’s notes from the phone call were released publicly on Friday by the House Oversight Committee.
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“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen,” Trump said, according to the notes. “We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election.”
“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, said in a statement.
While Trump’s campaign and allies filed dozens of lawsuits alleging electoral malfeasance and fraud in various battleground states, the former president sought to pressure officials to get them on board with the effort.
Trump tried pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” the number of votes sufficient to eclipse the margin of President Joe Biden’s victory. That call is now under scrutiny as part of a criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election in Fulton County.
“The Committee has begun scheduling interviews with key witnesses to investigate the full extent of the former President’s corruption, and I will exercise every tool at my disposal to ensure all witness testimony is secured without delay,” Maloney added.
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Donoghue’s notes were handed over to Congress as a part of the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigations into the efforts to overturn the election.
