Post-election reporting made it clear that President Donald Trump wanted others to fabricate evidence to back up his unfounded claims the Nov. 3 election had been stolen. When that failed, Trump pressured state election officials to falsify results. In a taped Jan. 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Trump suggets he “find 11,780 votes” to allow him to win the state’s electoral votes. It would be a “criminal offense,” Trump threatened, to allow the allow results to stand that awarded them to Joe Biden.
This is a clear pattern of behavior.
Former special counsel Robert Mueller testified to a House Judiciary Committee in July 2019 that President Trump had asked his White House counsel Don McGahn to create a false record that Trump had not ordered him to fire Mueller. McGahn refused.
Now a blockbuster New York Times story published Monday recounts a Dec. 1 White House meeting between a furious Trump and White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, in which “Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results.”
Did Trump direct Barr to fabricate evidence? Federal authorities and Democratic impeachment managers will want to know.
The Times report examines 77 days in which Trump nurtured a lie of a stolen election. His lie was “propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media” all the way to the violent insurrection of Jan. 6.
Before Thanksgiving, a team of attorneys Barr called “clowns” had drafted a plan to challenge before the Supreme Court the election results in states Trump lost. But only a state attorney general could bring such a case, and only Ken Paxton of Texas would do it. Other attorneys general saw too many red flags in the plan to attach their names to it. Paxton filed his brief on Dec. 7, not disclosing “it had been written by outside parties.”
The Times continues:
The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
Condemnation, some of it from conservative legal experts, rained down. The suit made “a mockery of federalism” and “would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles,” read a brief from a group of Republican office holders and former administration officials. Putting a finer point on it, Richard L. Hasen, an election-law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, called it “a heaping pile of a lawsuit.”
One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
That prompted a call from the president, who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed. The pressure campaign was on.
Another Trump threat to a Georgia official. Another possible federal and state crime from the former president.
The Times report also reveals that plans to march from the Ellipse to the Capitol were not part of the long-planned Jan. 6 rally planning until the White House became involved. Dustin Stockton, one of the organizers and a Breitbart veteran, said he only learned of it on the day of the rally. Rebranded “March to Save America,” the rally had “effectively become a White House production.”
New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.
For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.
Not that any of these details will prevent feckless, weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate from voting to acquit Trump at the end of his second Senate trial. They have too little integrity to do otherwise.