Trump called his acting attorney general almost daily to pressure him into investigate 2020 election-fraud claims, and was ignored every time, report says
- Then-President Trump kept pushing Jeffrey Rosen to probe election-fraud claims, WaPo reported.
- But Rosen reportedly refused to bend to his demands, always remaining noncommittal.
- More information is emerging of the lengths Trump went to overturn the election.
Then-President Donald Trump called then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen almost daily during his final months in office to pressure him into helping overturn the 2020 presidential election results, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing two sources.
According to the sources, Trump would in the calls present Rosen with information that he claimed showed the election had been tainted by fraud on a vast scale, and ask Rosen what the Justice Department intended to do about it.
"Trump was absolutely obsessed about it," a person familiar with the conversations told The Post.
But Rosen refused to promise Trump that he was going to take any action, remaining noncommittal in his response, the sources told The Post.
Representatives for Trump and Rosen did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
This is not the first report of Rosen resisting pressure from Trump to investigate claims of election fraud.
A January 1, 2021, email released last month showed Rosen expressing frustration with then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' fixation on a conspiracy theory that Italian officials tampered with ballots in Fulton County, Georgia.
"Can you believe this?" an email from Rosen said. "I am not going to respond to the message below."
Rosen also told a congressional panel in May that under his stewardship, the Justice Department had taken no special action to lend credibility to Trump's election fraud allegations, and that he had seen no evidence to indicate they were credible.
Since his defeat last November, Trump has focused on pushing his claim that the election was stolen from him as a result of mass fraud.
During his final weeks in office, he launched a campaign to persuade officials at a state and federal level to back his accusations, despite the scarcity of any compelling evidence to support them.
The claim has been defeated or withdrawn in a series of legal challenges in swing states, and the Supreme Court twice refused to hear lawsuits owing to the lack of evidence substantiating it.
In recent weeks, further accounts have emerged of the lengths Trump went to in his bid to undermine Joe Biden's victory, with Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fearing that the president was planning on invoking the Insurrection Act as part of a coup.
Trump had replaced then-Attorney General Bill Barr with Rosen during his final 30 days in office, after Barr said the Justice Department had not uncovered any evidence of voter fraud on a scale that would delegitimize Biden's victory.