DOJ Independence: Attacking Prosecutors, Demanding Investigations of Political Opponents

Overview

The Oval Office meeting on January 3, 2021, was the clearest summary of four years. The President of the United States was trying to replace his acting Attorney General with an official who would send false letters to state governments claiming the DOJ had found widespread election fraud — fraud that the DOJ's own investigations had found did not exist.

Every senior official in the room threatened to resign. He backed down.

The Pattern

Fifty public demands for prosecutions of political opponents. The Comey firing. The Mueller firing order (that McGahn refused to execute). The pressure on Sessions to unrecuse. The pressure on Rosenstein. The pressure on Rosen and Donoghue.

The pattern was consistent: the DOJ was being treated as an instrument for protecting the president's political interests and attacking his political opponents, rather than as an independent law enforcement institution.

Jeffrey Clark

Clark had drafted a letter that would have told Georgia — and six other states — that the DOJ had "identified significant concerns" about the election outcome. The DOJ had not identified such concerns. The letter would have been false.

He was prepared to sign it if Rosen would not. The plan was that he would be installed as acting AG and would send the letters, creating the predicate for state legislatures to appoint alternative electors.

Four DOJ officials and the White House Counsel's Office threatened mass resignation in a single meeting to stop it.

Barr's Verdict

William Barr — who had given Trump more protection from the Mueller investigation than almost any figure in the administration — resigned rather than endorse the election fraud claims. He told the AP before resigning that DOJ investigations had found no fraud sufficient to change the outcome.

When even Barr will not support the claim, the claim has no factual basis.