President Donald Trump addresses supporters from the White House shortly after 2 a.m. on Wednesday.Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In the weeks afterDonald Trumplost the 2020 presidential election, his administration drafted a memo calling for anyone who didn’t believe the election was fraudulent to be fired.
The draft statement, which was never released, came weeks after former Atty. Gen. Bill Barr pushed back at Trump’s unfounded claims of fraud, publicly stating there was no evidence of voter fraud “that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
Barrresigned from officeafter affirming that there was no fraud, but Trump continued to tout his false claims.
Bill Barr, Donald Trump.Matt McClain-Pool/Getty Images; Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images
The Capitol riots — which led to the deaths of at least five people, including a Capitol police officer — resulted in the bi-partisan committee investigation, which took the depositions of dozens of former Trump officials.
In June, former acting Atty. Gen.Jeffrey Rosentestified that, when he took on the roleafter Barr resigned, he faced pressure almost daily to uncover evidence that Biden and Democrats had stolen the 2020 presidential election.
“Between Dec. 23 and Jan. 3, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day, with one or two exceptions,” Rosentestified. “The common element of all of [these meetings] was the president expressing his dissatisfaction that the Justice Department had not done enough to investigate election fraud.”
Rosen said that the Justice Department declined all of Trump’s requests for them to declare fraud, “because we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them.”
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Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time of the insurrection, testified that he took notes during the contentious period of time preceding the Jan. 6 riots. In one of them, he wrote that Trump told him: “Just say [the election] was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
source: people.com
