Evidence Of A Conspiracy Directed By Donald Trump For A Coup D’etat On January 6

HBO’s The Wire explained the first rule of a criminal conspiracy: “no f_king notes!” This is why Donald Trump loved the disreputable and disbarred Roy Cohn as his lawyer: he reportedly never took notes, for obvious reasons.

The New York Times first reported on Thursday, Trump Pressed Justice Dept. to Declare Election Results Corrupt, Notes Show:

President Donald J. Trump pressed [acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen] late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though [former Attorney General William Barr] had found no instances of widespread fraud, so he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results of the election, according to new documents provided to lawmakers.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the Justice Department had found no evidence for. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call, he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

Naturally, all three deny having conversations with President Trump about the D.O.J. questioning the election results. I’ve never known a defendant not to deny everything and to assert innocence.

The aiders and abettors of Trump’s conspiracy for a coup d’etat have been previously identified.

Politico reported before the January 6 coup d’etat on a remarkable White House meeting with Republican congressional conspirators. House Republicans meet with Trump to discuss overturning election results:

President Donald Trump huddled with a group of congressional Republicans at the White House on Monday, where they strategized over a last-ditch effort to overturn the election results next month, according to several members who attended the meeting.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) — who is spearheading the long-shot push to overturn the election results in Congress — organized the trio of White House meetings, which lasted over three hours and included roughly a dozen lawmakers. The group also met with Vice President Mike Pence, who will be presiding over the joint session of Congress when lawmakers officially certify the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, as well as members of Trump’s legal team.

[In] addition to the “dozens” of House Republicans who are committed to objecting to the election results, Brooks said there are “multiple” Senate Republicans who are now receptive to the effort, though he declined to name names. Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), whom Trump has repeatedly praised on Twitter recently, has said he is considering the idea.

“More and more congressmen and senators are being persuaded that the election was stolen,” Brooks said, who claimed that momentum for the effort is growing.

Other members who were in attendance include some of Trump’s staunchest allies on the Hill, such as Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

The Washington Post reported after the January 6 coup d’etat, [Ali Alexander] said three GOP lawmakers helped plan his D.C. rally:

Ali Alexander, who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement, said he hatched the plan — coinciding with Congress’s vote to certify the electoral college votes — alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.

“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

As the Capitol building was being breached by the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrectionists, it was Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Texas Senator Ted Cruz who were executing the plan inside Congress. Sen. Ted Cruz, House GOP Object To Arizona’s Electoral Votes: A group of House Republicans led by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Az.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) objected to Arizona’s electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden in Congress.

These are all fact witnesses, if not co-conspirators and aiders and abettors, who need to be called to testify under oath by Congressional committees. Committee lawyers should already have issued subpoenas to these co-conspirators, IMHO.

In total, 139 Republican House members, including Traitor Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader, and 8 Republican senators provided aid and comfort to the seditious insurrectionists. The 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack. They are all complicit in this heinous crime.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump notes, Newly revealed notes drag congressional Republicans into Trump’s election-subversion effort (excerpt):

Notes taken by Rosen’s deputy Richard Donoghue reveal Trump’s plan, such as it was.

Trump appears to have suggested that he was better versed on the situation than the top Justice Department official, because, he said, Rosen and his team “may not be following the internet the way I do.” (As a nation, we can be grateful that they were not.)

“[U]nderstand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” Rosen said to Trump, according to Donoghue’s summary.

“[D]on’t expect you to do that,” Trump said in response, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Everything until those last four words was pretty well-established.

[W]hat Donoghue’s notes suggest is that Trump had fully bought into the effort that would eventually become his Alamo: having Republican legislators block the electoral-vote counting due to take place at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

It was already established that some Trump allies would stand up in opposition to the counting of votes on that day. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) told Breitbart News more than a week earlier that he planned to do so. Others quickly signed on. It was on Dec. 19 that Trump himself first tweeted about Jan. 6, coupling promotion of yet-another false conspiracy theory about the election with the request that his supporters come to Washington on the day the votes would be counted: “Be there, will be wild!”

It hasn’t been clear, though, how closely the White House worked with those legislators in anticipation of the day. There have been hints for some time that members of Congress were in contact with the organizers of a protest at the Capitol that day, with one leader of that effort identifying Brooks and two others by name as having “schemed” with him about how to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.” But what about the days before? What, if anything, was the strategy for blocking the electoral votes beyond the objections that actually occurred? How closely was Trump involved in the effort?

[In] December of last year, he wanted Rosen to validate the effort to object to the vote in broad strokes, at which point … something would happen. But what? And with whom?

It’s possible that Trump’s plan went no further than that. It’s possible that he identified those “R. Congressmen” as part of the effort for no reason other than that he knew they planned to object. But that he mentioned them at all does suggest more integration than had previously been indicated. And, as ProPublica has reported, there was clearly some coordination between the White House and the hybrid events that day, including discussions about speaking roles.

Trump and his allies reportedly put the day’s violence to use, looking to leverage the interruption to the vote-counting caused by the rioters who stormed the Capitol. The president and his allies tried calling Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in an effort to gum up the works. He spoke with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that day, as well, though it’s not clear when or about what. Trump’s call with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that day was less friendly, but centered on Trump’s failure to condemn the violence.

One of the unanswered questions about the events of that day is precisely what the White House and Trump’s Republican allies knew about them and how they might have contributed to them behind the scenes. This is a central target of the select committee established to probe the eruption of violence. Certainly, there may be no fire under the smoke.

But, again, some congressional Republicans clearly did their best to aid Trump’s effort. On the morning of Jan. 6, Brooks spoke before Trump at a rally outside the White House. It was time, he said, to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” It’s not clear if any of those in attendance did the former, but some clearly did the latter.

The Times continues:

The Justice Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.

Typically, the department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private discussions between a president and his cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.

In fact, Jeffrey Rosen testified to Congress in May, and dodged answering specific questions from the committee about his conversations with President Trump, presumably because of executive privilege (it is not attorney-client privilege). MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has a good summary.

Now that the notes of the conversations have been produced by the DOJ to Congress, any privileges have now been lost. Congressional committees must call Jeffrey A. Rosen and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, to testify under oath. They must now answer fully and truthfully.

[H]anding over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also told Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and other former officials this week that they could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committees.

The department reasoned that congressional investigators were examining potential wrongdoing by a sitting president, an extraordinary circumstance, according to letters sent to the former officials. Because executive privilege is meant to benefit the country, rather than the president as an individual, invoking it over Mr. Trump’s efforts to push his personal agenda would be inappropriate, the department concluded.

“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement.

Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus on overturning the election results. At one point, Mr. Trump claimed voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted elections.” Mr. Donoghue pushed back.

“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Mr. Donoghue said, adding that the department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and had not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Mr. Trump, according to the notes.

The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063 percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it found no evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes.

[T]he officials also told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no evidence to support a lawsuit regarding the election results. “We are not in a position based on the evidence,” they said. “We can only act on the actual evidence developed.”

Mr. Trump castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.”

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document.

In a moment of foreshadowing, Mr. Trump said, “people tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in,” referring to the acting chief of the Justice Department’s civil division, who had also encouraged department officials to intervene in the election. “People want me to replace D.O.J. leadership.”

“You should have the leadership you want,” Mr. Donoghue replied. But it would not change the department’s position on a lack of widespread election fraud, he noted.

Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Rosen did not know that Rep. Perry had introduced Mr. Clark to Mr. Trump. One week later, they would be forced to fight Mr. Clark for their jobs in an Oval Office showdown.

During the call, Mr. Trump also told the Justice Department officials to “figure out what to do” with Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son. “People will criticize the D.O.J. if he’s not investigated for real,” he told them, violating longstanding guidelines against White House intervention in criminal investigations or other law enforcement actions.

Two days after the phone call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Donoghue took notes of a meeting with Justice Department officials that also included Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows; the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone; and the White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin. They met to discuss a conspiracy theory known as Italygate, which asserts without evidence that people in Italy used military technology to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.

The Justice Department officials told the White House that they had assigned someone to look into the matter, according to the notes and a person briefed on the meeting. They did not mention that the department was looking into the theory to debunk it, the person said.

While the Justice Department officials kept the pressure campaign hidden from public view, the emails obtained by Congress and interviews with former Trump administration officials show they were alarmed by Mr. Trump’s behavior, particularly when he complained about the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, whom he viewed as not doing enough to examine voter fraud accusations there.

Mr. Pak abruptly stepped down on Jan. 4, after Mr. Donoghue told him about the president’s plot with Mr. Clark and of Mr. Trump’s concerns about Atlanta, according to documents and interviews.

As for the Republican congressional co-conspirators in Trump’s plot for a coup d’etat, the Justice Department declined to defend Rep. Mo Brooks against Jan. 6 incitement lawsuit:

The Justice Department and the House of Representatives declined on Tuesday to represent Rep. Mo Brooks in a lawsuit that accuses him of helping to incite the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Justice Department rejected the notion that he was acting in his official capacity, noting that his remarks at Trump’s rally were almost entirely political.

“The record indicates that the January 6 rally was an electioneering or campaign activity that Brooks would ordinarily be presumed to have undertaken in an unofficial capacity,” Justice Department civil attorneys said in a 29-page filing late Tuesday.

Also, Brooks stands accused of fomenting violence against the Capitol, which would be contrary to his duties as a lawmaker.

Earlier in the day, House counsel Doug Letter offered a similar rejection, noting that the House rarely intervenes in legal disputes between individual lawmakers, particularly when they’re not related to official House business. In his filing, Letter appended a letter from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the chair of the House Administration Committee, urging the Justice Department to reject Brooks’ request for legal representation, as well.

Finally, the citizens watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has called for a federal criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s suspected “weaponization” of the Justice Department in an attempt to seize control of an election he had already lost. Watchdog Group Calls For Probe Of Trump’s ‘Weaponization’ Of Justice Department:

The letter — to Attorney General Merrick Garland from CREW — was sent Thursday following revelations that Trump had ordered acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in a December phone call to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me,” according to handwritten notes taken at the time by a senior DOJ official who was on the call.

The shocking communication was part of a trove of documents recently released by House Oversight and Reform Committee that detailed efforts by Trump and his supporters to pressure the DOJ to support his baseless claims of election fraud. Trump called Justice Department officials almost daily to harangue them to overturn his election loss, despite any evidence of any corruption, according to the records.

The letter from CREW asks Garland to determine whether Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows “violated federal criminal law by attempting to weaponize the DOJ in service of their larger campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”

The organization is alleging that both Trump and Meadows violated both criminal law and provisions of the Hatch Act.

The newly released emails and other reports “appear to demonstrate that President Trump and Mr. Meadows illegally pressured senior DOJ officials to pursue politically motivated, frivolous election fraud investigations and file a baseless legal complaint in the United States Supreme Court as part of a conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their right to vote and have their votes counted,” the letter stated.

The letter also refers to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, arguing that Meadows and Trump’s behavior was “part of a broader conspiracy and … conduct aimed at undermining the democratic process that culminated in the seditious attack on the United States Capitol.”

There was no immediate response to the letter from Garland.