- Senior
DOJ officials were deeply alarmed by top Trump officials' fixation on the election results. - Trump chief of staff
Mark Meadows repeatedly asked DOJ to investigate bogus conspiracy theories. - One request was so concerning the acting AG documented it and the deputy AG called it "pure insanity."
Senior officials at the Justice Department expressed deep frustration and alarm with top Trump officials' fixation on the election results in the final days of Donald Trump's presidency. One such interaction left the acting attorney general so shaken that he decided to contemporaneously document the episode.
According to a trove of emails released by the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly asked Justice Department officials to investigate claims of purported voter and election fraud.
In a January 1 email to then-acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, Meadows asked the department to look into a YouTube video in which a retired CIA intelligence officer named Brad Johnson made broad, unverified claims that the US embassy in Rome somehow switched votes from Trump to Biden during the election. The baseless conspiracy theory, dubbed "ItalyGate," caught fire in right-wing circles in the days and weeks after the election, and Johnson was one of its key promoters.
Rosen forwarded Meadows' email to then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, to which Donoghue replied, "Pure insanity."
Rosen responded to Donoghue saying, "Yes."
He went on to say that after Meadows emailed him the YouTube video, he was asked to have the FBI meet with Johnson.
"I responded that Johnson could call or walk into FBI's Washington Field Office with any evidence he purports to have," Rosen wrote in the email, which appears to be a contemporaneous memo, a type of document that law enforcement and intelligence officials use to detail their knowledge of significant or legally dubious interactions.
"On a follow up call, I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as 'an insult,'" Rosen continued. "Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his 'witnesses,' and re-affirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this."
Giuliani was Trump's personal defense attorney at the time, and he was also under active investigation by the Justice Department over whether he violated foreign lobbying laws connected to his efforts to secure Trump's reelection.
In another January 1 email, Meadows asked Rosen to have the acting assistant attorney general, Jeff Clark, to investigate "signature match anomalies" in Fulton County, Georgia.
"Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation," Meadows wrote.
Rosen also forwarded that email to Donoghue and wrote, "Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to message below."
The emails published by the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday depict the most brazen effort yet by the Trump administration and top officials in the White House to reverse Trump's election defeat. They also illustrate the extent to which repeated requests for investigations by Meadows and others in Trump's orbit concerned Justice Department officials.
Trump, for his part, continues to claim that he was the rightful winner of the
In fact, nonpartisan election and cybersecurity experts have said that the past election was the safest and most secure in US history. But that hasn't stopped Republican state legislatures across the country from passing a slew of laws that would not only make it more difficult for voters to cast ballots, but also make it easier for partisan forces to control and potentially overturn states' election results.