Former President Donald Trump pressed the Justice Department during his waning weeks in office to join his failed effort to overturn his election defeat based on his false claims of voting fraud, but its leaders refused, with one decrying the "pure insanity" of the claims, documents released on Tuesday showed.
This report produced by Yahaira Jacquez.
In his final days in office, former President Donald Trump pressed the Justice Department to join his failed effort to overturn his election defeat.
That's according to documents released on Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee - which shed new light on how Trump and his allies tried to pressure top DOJ officials to investigate unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election - efforts rebuffed by Justice leadership.
In one email on December 14.
Trump, through an assistant, sent then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen a raft of documents claiming to show evidence of election fraud in Michigan - a debunked allegation that a federal judge had already rejected.
Then two weeks later, on Dec.
29, Trump's White House assistant emailed Rosen, who by then was the acting attorney general, and other DOJ lawyers a draft legal brief that they were urged to file at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The department never filed the brief, which argued that voting procedure changes amid the health crisis made by Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania - were unlawful.
President Joe Biden won all those states.
Other emails showed then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows asked Justice Department officials to investigate an unfounded conspiracy theory called "Italygate" alleging that U.S. electoral data was changed in Italian facilities with the knowledge of the CIA.
Rosen forwarded the email to another top DOJ official, who called it: "Pure insanity." Another email showed Rosen declined to arrange a meeting between DOJ officials and Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani about his false claims that the November election was stolen from Trump.
In an email to a colleague - Rosen wrote quote "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." Representative Carolyn B.
Maloney, a Democrat who is the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee said quote "These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation's chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost." Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
232 pages of emails have been released by House Oversight Committee Democrats.
