The alleged coup all came out in detail after MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes interviewed Katie Benner, The New York Times reporter behind the newspaper’s bombshell report on Donald Trump’s efforts to force out his acting Attorney General in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
“The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results,” Benner reported Friday evening.
SCOOP: The acting head of DOJ's civil division spoke with Trump about a plan to stop the steal; and then told Acting AG Rosen that he was gonna be replaced in order for the plan to be implemented. And then DOJ senior leaders said they would quit en masseBenner (@ktbenner) January 23, 2021
Trump had been trying, without success, to get his Acting Attorney General (who replaced William Barr when he resigned) to help him in casting doubts on the election results. But Rosen, citing a previous DOJ investigation, refused to carry out those plans. This led to Trump deciding to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark, according to Raw Story.
It seems that Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania arranged a meeting with Trump and Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer in the Department of Justice. Clark, a Trump loyalist, had been working on ways to cast doubt on the election results, hoping to bolster Trump’s ongoing legal battles and put pressure on Georgia politicians to change the electoral vote in their state.
So Perry met with Clark and went over a plan that would have the DOJ send a letter to Georgia officials disclosing the department would be investigating the election results, according to Reuters. Reuters points out that they have not independently verified this story.
However, “DOJ officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed? The answer was unanimous. They would resign,” said Benner. Trump changed his mind about getting rid of Rosen when the informal pact by DOJ officials was made known, fearing mass resignations would take the attention away from his election fraud accusations.
“Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis,” Benner explained.
On Saturday, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson saying it was launching a congressional probe into Trump and Clark’s actions and asked for the DOJ to turn over documents and communications to help assist their inquiry.