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The GOP “frontrunner”in the California recall (at 25%) is teeing up the Big Lie for the California Recall. Of course he is:

Larry Elder charges that the 2020 presidential election was full of “shenanigans” and says he worried about potential voting irregularities in the Sept. 14 California recall election of embattled Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.

That’s why Elder, a conservative talk radio host and the polling front runner among the California gubernatorial replacement candidates, is urging supporters to report to his campaign anything they think is suspicious.

“The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans. And my fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall. So I’m urging people to go to ElectElder.com. Whenever you see anything, hear anything suspicious, go to my website. We have a battery of lawyers. We’re going to file a lawsuit in a timely fashion this time,” Elder said Sunday in an exclusive interview on Fox News “Media Buzz.”

He’s just great, isn’t he?

He really doesn’t have to prompt the California Trumpers. They’re already there:

Looking to oust the governor? Ed Brown has just the right merch for you.

Camouflage Recall Newsom hats and Recall Newsom masks. He’s gotRecall Newsom yard signs. A stack of Recall Newsom pamphlets.

But just days before California voters decide whether to push Democrat Gavin Newsom from office, the trailer off Golden Chain Highway was mostly a shrine to former President Trump.

“As far as I’m concerned, Trump is the president,” said Brown, 67.ADVERTISING

And as for the recall election?

“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said of Newsom’s supporters, adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”

The Republican-backed recall election could not be more consequential for California. Set amid a deadly wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, with record-breaking wildfires and a relentless drought drying fields and faucets, it gives the GOP its best shot in over a decade at governing the nation’s most populous state.

And if there’s a symbolic heart of recall mania, it may be here in Amador County in the Sierra foothills, where about 1 in 5 registered voters signed petitions to give Newsom the boot. That’s the highest concentration in California.

The most fervent support for the recall has come from Northern California, where rural conservatives say that their voices are drowned out in Sacramento by urban Democrats and that they would be better off seceding to form their own state called Jefferson.

Conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election. By and large, they refuse to cast their ballots by mail, believing his false claims that mail-in voting leads to rampant voter fraud. If Newsom prevails, many won’t trust the results — just as they didn’t after Trump lost.

In Newsom, they have found an avatar for the Democratic Party and everything they hate about it — a political entity in opposition to many of the things they hold dear, including (and sometimes especially) Trump.

“In many ways, the recall was never really about Gavin Newsom in particular,” said Kim Nalder, a political science professor at Cal State Sacramento.

Rather, she said, recall supporters are fueled by a “laundry list of complaints that Republicans had about liberals.”

No, it was the same cynical, opportunistic use of undemocratic tactics to seize power when the vast majority of people don’t agree with you that Republicans are doing all over the country. Republicans simply no longer believe they have to accept the results of elections they don’t like and they are willing to use any means at their disposal to turn them around.

Gavin Newsom is up for reelection next year. Instead they have made the state pay almost 300 million dollars for this ridiculous recall. It’s not impossible that they can unseat Newsom if Democrats fail to mail in their ballots but either way, it’s a win. If they lose they get to claim that the vote was rigged and further the Big Lie.

In case you haven’t seen this Australian TV interview of the nutball Sidney Powell, here it is:

Ed Kilgore at NY Magazine has done an invaluable service by putting together the timeline of Trump’s Big Lie. I’m posting it here for the record. It’s my hope that we’re going to need it when the January 6th Committee gets rolling:

The House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot and the various media ticktocks explaining what Donald Trump and his allies were doing in the days immediately leading up to it are casting new light on an important threat to American democracy. But the intense focus on a few wild days in Washington can be misleading as well. Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 presidential election began shortly after the 2016 election, and arguably the moment of peak peril for Joe Biden’s inauguration had already passed by the time Trump addressed the Stop the Steal rally on January 6.

A full timeline of the attempted insurrection is helpful in putting Trump’s frantic, last-minute schemes into the proper context and countering the false impression that January 6 was an improvised, impossible-to-replicate event, rather than one part of an ongoing campaign. If Congress fails to seize its brief opportunity to reform our electoral system, the danger could recur in future elections — perhaps with a different, catastrophic outcome.

Laying the Groundwork: Trump claims “millions” voted illegally in 2016

Epitomizing the rare phenomenon of the sore winner, Trump insisted in late November 2016 that he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He repeated the lie for years and even claimed falsely in a June 2019 interview with Meet the Press that California “admitted” it had counted “a million” illegal votes.

This wasn’t just a tossed-off random Trumpian fabrication. His insistence that Democrats had deployed ineligible (and probably noncitizen) voters led to his appointment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017. The commission was ostensibly led by Vice-President Mike Pence but was more closely identified with its co-chairman Kris Kobach, the immigrant-bashing, vote-suppressing secretary of State of Kansas. As David Daley explains, it was a wide-ranging fishing expedition that caught exactly zero fish:

Kobach’s plan was easy to discern: The commission was to be the front through which a cabal of shadowy Republican activists and oft-debunked academics, backed by misleading studies, laundered their phony voting-fraud theories into a justification for real-world suppression tactics such as national voter ID and massive coast-to-coast electoral-roll purges.

The commission was soon disbanded empty-handed, with Kobach & Co. blaming its failure on noncooperation from states that refused to turn over voters’ personal information. But in MAGA Land, wild voter-fraud claims become more credible each time they are repeated, so the commission was a sound investment in future lies.

Republicans raise bogus concerns about ballot counting in the 2018 midterms

In an effort to spin Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections, House GOP leaders Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy seized on four contests in California in which Republicans led in early vote counting but lost when late mail ballots came in. Without alleging (much less proving) anything in particular, congressional Republicans suggested skullduggery in what was a normal trend in the counting of entirely legal ballots signed and mailed before Election Day but received afterward. I dismissed this GOP spin, which McCarthy was still pushing a year later, but warned that “all this ex post facto delegitimization of elections that [Republicans] lost sounds like a dress rehearsal for how they’ll behave if they do poorly again next year.”

The president himself made similar allegations after the 2018 midterms, though he focused on two races the GOP eventually won. On Veterans Day, Trump declared that Florida’s Senate and governor’s race should be called in favor of the Republicans who were ahead on Election Night, though legally cast overseas military and civilian mail ballots had yet to be counted. He tweeted, falsely, that these “massively infected” ballots had shown up “out of nowhere” and thus must be ignored:

The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!

This did, indeed, turn out to be a dress rehearsal. Trump went on to make almost identical charges about late-arriving (or just late-counted) mail ballots on Election Night 2020.

Trump suggests that voting by mail is inherently fraudulent

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020, states holding primaries and special elections naturally began liberalizing opportunities to vote by mail. Trump went bananas on Twitter in May, threatening to withhold federal funding from Michigan because its secretary of State had sent absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters.

Twitter, in what was then an unprecedented action, took down two Trump tweets in which he mendaciously attacked California for “sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone … no matter who they are or how they got there.” Actually, of course, the ballots went only to registered voters.

Trump’s goal seemed clear: By asserting that voting by mail is tantamount to voter fraud, he was setting up a bogus justification for contesting election results in any state he lost.

Trump prepares to exploit the “Red Mirage”

Team Trump’s parallel strategy was to get Republicans to eschew voting by mail to ensure that the votes most often counted first (in-person Election Day ballots) would skew red as forcefully as possible (which is why one analyst dubbed the scheme the “Red Mirage”). As Election Day approached, there were many signs that, simply by attacking voting by mail as illegitimate, Trump was succeeding in discouraging his supporters from voting that way, thus producing the desired Election Night “skew” in his favor.

In September, Trump’s hostility to mail ballots and threats to just claim victory became more intense and regular. In his first debate with Biden, on September 30, the plan to contest any election loss was made plain. Following an incoherent diatribe recapping his unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud, Trump was pressed on whether he would urge his supporters to “stay calm” and “not engage in any civil unrest” during the ballot-counting process, which would likely be drawn out due to unprecedented levels of voting by mail. “Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?” moderator Chris Wallace asked.

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully,” Trump replied. “If it’s a fair election, I am 100 percent onboard. But if I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.”

November 4, 2020 – January 5, 2021

The Post election scramble: Trump declares victory on Election Night

With Trump ahead but giving up ground in a number of states he would ultimately lose, he made his long-awaited play. At around 3 a.m. on November 4, he concluded his remarks to his supporters by saying:

This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.

It seems plausible that Trump delayed his premature victory claim by a few hours because it initially appeared that he might win legitimately. An “insider” account of Trump’s Election Night activities recently published in the Washington Post aired the theory that his declaration might have been spurred by a spontaneous suggestion from an inebriated Rudy Giuliani. But the many times Trump himself predicted he would do exactly this would indicate otherwise.

Trump’s “clown show” legal team challenges the election in court

A steadily changing cast of Trump campaign lawyers, eventually featuring histrionic extremists Giuliani and Sidney Powell, fired off 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election results. Most were laughably frivolous, and 61 were rejected on widely varying grounds. The one that succeeded, in Pennsylvania, involved a small number of ballots with technical errors that a local judge had allowed voters to “cure” after a statutory deadline.

There were two big opportunities for a Hail Mary from the Supreme Court, but Trump lost both times. On December 8, the Court refused without comment to hear a claim by Republican congressman Mike Kelly that Pennsylvania’s expansion of voting by mail was invalid because it was not enacted by a constitutional amendment. And on December 11, another shot at the claim that state legislatures cannot delegate their election powers was rejected by the Court on grounds that the state bringing the suit had no standing to challenge procedures in the targeted states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

By then, the Trump campaign’s legal effort had descended into full farce, as became obvious on November 19 when Giuliani and Powell held a wild press conference featuring outlandish conspiracy theories, including communist manipulation of voting machines. Both Attorney General William Barr and White House adviser Jared Kushner reportedly dismissed the Trump legal team’s efforts as a “clown show.”

Trump tries to enlist Republican state legislators

Arguably the most serious Trump attempt to steal the election involved pleas to Republican legislators in key states won by Biden to dispute the results before they could be certified (the step before the formal award of electoral votes). As of November 21, Trump was publicly making arguments for this extreme remedy, but as Politico observed, it was a long shot from the get-go: “Republican-led legislatures in states Biden won would need to move to overturn their state’s popular vote and appoint a slate of Trump electors when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.” The opposition of Democratic governors in Michigan and Pennsylvania would have stopped such maneuvers absent an unlikely court finding that legislatures have sole power to appoint electors. And legislators in those two states didn’t respond to Trump’s requests for assistance.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia certified their election returns by December 9, and on December 14, presidential electors cast their ballots to make Biden the president-elect.

Trump pressures Georgia officials to “find” 11,000 votes

Trump continued his attempt to find state politicians willing to help him reverse the election results even after passing every deadline established by Congress over more than a century to cut off presidential-election disputes.

On December 5, he called Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who had backed the certification of Biden’s win, to ask him to convene the state legislature to overturn the results and appoint pro-Trump electors (Kemp declined to do so). On December 23, Trump called Bonnie Watson, a lowly election investigator for Georgia secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, urging her to find fault with mail ballots since “I won [Georgia] by hundreds of thousands of votes. It wasn’t close.”

On January 2, 2021, he concluded this particular line of election tampering by appealing directly to Raffensperger to find him some more votes. “So look. All I want to do is this,” the president said in a recorded conversation. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Trump urges Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt”

Trump was also working the state angle from the other direction, conspiring in particular with Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to push Republican legislatures to investigate and possibly overturn Biden’s victory.

Clark drafted a letter to Republican officials in Georgia, claiming falsely that the DOJ was “investigating various irregularities” in the 2020 election. The letter urged them to convene a special legislative session to investigate these voter-fraud claims and consider “issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” Clark reportedly prepared similar letters addressed to GOP legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

None of these letters was ever sent out because Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue refused to go along. “There is no chance that I would sign this letter or anything remotely like this,” Donoghue told Clark in an email obtained by ABC News.

The @JudiciaryDems investigation into former President Trump’s attempt to enlist the DOJ in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election has already revealed some frightening truths. Just yesterday, we heard seven hours of testimony from Jeffrey Rosen alone. Much more is to come. 

In recent closed-door testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Rosen said his monthlong tenure as acting attorney general was marked by Trump’s “persistent” efforts to have the Justice Department discredit the election results. For instance, during a December 27 phone call, Rosen told Trump that he needed to “understand that the DOJ can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” according to Donoghue’s notes on the call.

“[I] don’t expect you to do that,” Trump reportedly answered, “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”

Only a wholesale revolt by senior DOJ staff prevented Trump from carrying out the plan. On January 3, the president met with top Justice Department officials to discuss his desire to oust Rosen in favor of Clark, who could then advance bogus voter-fraud claims and pressure state officials as acting attorney general. Trump was informed that DOJ leaders had agreed to resign en masse if he fired Rosen, and the president eventually accepted that the move “would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results,” according to the New York Times.

Trump attempts to bully Pence into rejecting Biden’s electoral votes

“It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” pic.twitter.com/cIZvfCMfnt

Trump calls on congressional allies to block confirmation of Biden’s win

The fallback strategy for interfering with Biden’s accession to the presidency was to utilize the procedures in the Electoral Count Act enabling challenges in Congress to individual state certifications. Alabama congressman Mo Brooks announced in early December that he would challenge selected Biden electors.

Trump promptly thanked Brooks publicly and encouraged others to join him, particularly in the Senate since every challenge requires the support of at least one member from each chamber. Mitch McConnell discouraged his troops from joining the rebellion, but soon enough, hard-core Trump supporters like Tommy Tuberville, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and others climbed aboard the Insurrection Express.

This set the stage for the Capitol Riot.

January 6, 2021 – Present

The Insurrection Goes Live

For weeks, Trump called on his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 to protest Biden’s election (and back whatever play he could manage in Congress). On December 20, he tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election…. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

By December 30, multiple groups, some of them known for armed extremism, were planning to converge on D.C. in response to Trump’s summons. “Stop the Steal,” a rubric invented by Roger Stone in 2016 in anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory, became the protesters’ organizing slogan.

As a joint session of Congress was convening to confirm the Biden victory, Trump addressed the faithful gathered on the National Mall. Much of the debate over his subsequent impeachment and Senate trial revolved around exactly what he said to the demonstrators who subsequently broke into the Capitol and temporarily shut down the confirmation of Biden’s victory. Was this the smoking gun from his address?

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.

Or maybe this?

We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

Equally significant from a broader perspective was Trump’s language echoing the lies he told about Democrats “finding” votes during the wee hours on Election Night, which he would continue to use as a rallying cry long afterward:

Our election was over at ten o’clock in the evening. We’re leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.

And then late in the evening, or early in the morning — boom — these explosions of bullshit. And all of a sudden. All of a sudden it started to happen.

Arizona conducts an endless election “audit”

Even after the failure of the January 6 insurrection, and then Biden’s inauguration, cut off even the most remote possibility of an election coup, Trump claimed vindication when Republican senators saved him from being convicted and banned from holding office again after his second impeachment. Then he and his supporters devised another way to keep pointlessly challenging the 2020 results. In Arizona (with sporadic efforts to repeat the tactic in other states, so far unsuccessfully), hard-core Trump activists in the state senate ordered an election “audit” (a legally meaningless term) of votes in Maricopa County, which went solidly for Biden after Trump carried it in 2016.

This strange exercise, conducted by an unqualified consulting firm led by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist, was supposed to last 60 days but has now gone on for more than five months without producing any evidence of the kind of irregularities that might call Biden’s Arizona win into question. The idea seems to be to muddy the waters just enough that those who already believe in a Biden “steal” can nourish their grievances right up until the next presidential cycle.

Trump keeps the Big Lie alive

There’s been a lot of media derision about Trump’s postpresidential efforts to wave the bloody shirt of the stolen election. It’s easy to assume the 45th president is just trying to stay in the news or stay relevant or give vent to his natural mood of narcissistic grievance and vengeance. However, the damage he is doing to the credibility of democratic institutions among Republican rank-and-file voters and conservative activists is not fading but is being compounded daily.

It’s entirely plausible that Trump or some authorized successor will build on the lies he deployed so regularly during the 2020 election cycle and plan a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose response to whatever happens on November 5, 2024, as I argued in April 2021:

If you begin not with the assumption that Trump’s entire effort to steal the election was absurd but regard it as an audacious plan that wasn’t executed with the necessary precision, then reverse engineering it to fix the broken parts makes sense …

And the really heady thing for Trump is knowing how easy it was to convince the GOP rank-and-file base that his lies were the gospel truth.

Put together shrewd vote suppressors, audacious state legislators, emboldened conservative media, a better slate of lawyers, a new generation of compliant judges, and quite possibly a Republican-controlled Congress, and the insurrection plot could finally succeed.

The young woman addressing the assembled activists had a depth of experience in deep canvassing. Rather than trying to get people to vote or to vote for a specific candidate, deep canvassing involves front-porch conversations more about listening than persuading. It is a technique for changing hearts and minds over time, especially in conservative, rural America.

After several encounters with one man in a county west of here, she finally saw that the source of his general resentment was not liberals or government at all. He had lost a good friend to opioid addiction. He needed someone to blame for it.

What brings that to mind is Russell Berman’s article in The Atlantic about voter ID. Especially, issuing some form of national identity card to use for voting. “[T]he nation’s current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised.” National ID cards are the norm in many countries.

The problem in the U.S. is that the concept evokes images of Big Brother across the political spectrum.

“There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it,” says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Even so, Republicans have spent decades promoting the idea. Insisting on it. Election integrity, voter fraud, and all that. But like the rural man hostile to liberals and government, those are not the real reason Republicans insist on IDs for voting. “Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65,” Berman writes:

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. [Spread the Vote’s Kat] Calvin’s staff and volunteers work with people—many of whom are homeless or were recently incarcerated—to assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOP’s insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. “It’s hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes,” Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

Because it is.

But in the current fight to pass voting rights legislation through Congress, even Democrats are rethinking the ID requirement. Even voting-rights icon Stacey Abrams and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina will consider Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to add some form of ID requirement to the bill.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. “My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment,” she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. “My whole job is helping people who don’t have utility bills get IDs,” she said. “What they were saying is: If you don’t have a home or an apartment or if your name isn’t on the lease on that home or apartment, you don’t deserve to vote, you don’t deserve to participate in democracy.”

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, “with a plan and a budget to implement it.” She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. “It’s a pipe dream,” she said. Calvin’s right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

But beside logistical obstacles, there is another reason to oppose the ID requirement. Satisfy that demand and Republicans will just make another. Because voter fraud is not the real source of their election anxieties any more than liberals or big government were to blame for the opioid addiction cited above. Republicans champion requiring IDs to vote because in their minds the hurdle will require nothing of most of their voters. It will impact more Democratic voters than Republican ones, even though it will impact their own, too. It’s a game of percentages. Resistance to IDs feeds their narrative that Democrats oppose it because they want to cheat. Either way, they win.

Satisfy Republicans’ demand and they’ll simply make another. With abortion as well. The issue is too powerful to lose for Republican voter mobilization. Should the Supreme Court finally kill Roe, another issue will have to be found to replace it.

They want their weapon, as Dustin Hoffman said in Outbreak.

When last week his rally booed Donald Trump’s suggestion that attendees get vaccinated against COVID-19, it was a clue that he was losing his grip on the political base he helped radicalize. Trump had not initiated their descent into madness, but until recently he seemed their master. Movement conservatives had bred and fed the monster for decades when, like so many man-made monsters in fiction, they lost control. Trump seemed in command of the mob, too, until recently. Watch Sen. Lindsey Graham for signs of Trump’s eroding influence on the GOP.

While the party is united in its criticism of President Joe Biden over the Afghanistan evacuation, the effort to resettle refugees is driving a wedge between Republicans willing to accept Afghan refugees into the United States and those fed years of relentless anti-immigrant messages from Trump and his closest allies.

On the one hand, the GOP on the whole wants to slam Biden’s evacuation efforts (about 100,000 have been evacuated to date) over the fate of American allies who risk retribution by the Taliban if they stay. The message from the anti-immigrant Trumpist wing is, don’t you dare bring those dangerous foreigners here. Evacuate them, sure, but dump them somewhere else. Trump, in his usual, fact-free way, insists Biden is admitting an unknown number of terrorists.

Annie Karni writes (New York Times):

The unusual split is pitting traditional conservatives, who are more inclined to defend those who have sacrificed for America, against the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee wing of the party. And it is a fresh test of Mr. Trump’s power to make Republican leaders fall in line behind him.

“The core divide within the Republican Party, post-Trump, is on immigration,” said Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster. “The Republican Party used to be the party of immigration, and Trump changed all of that.”

The debate highlights the larger ideological divide within the party between “America First” isolationists like Mr. Trump and Republicans who believe maintaining strong alliances and America’s influence abroad benefits the country’s security.

Former Trump adviser and noted xenophobe Stephen Miller believes the party would come together to oppose Afghan resettlement in the U.S.:

“There’s an enormous amount of agreement among conservatives that there is no desire among the American public at all for a large-scale resettlement of generalized refugees,” he said.

With right-wing hosts on Fox News like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson aligning with the anti-refugee wing of the party, Ms. Longwell, the Republican strategist, said that “the open question” was whether Republican sentiment that America was morally obligated to help Afghan allies “diminishes after two weeks.”

“Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan?” Ms. Ingraham said on her prime-time cable news show last week.

“Potentially” does a lot of work in Trump’s circles, as in potential voter fraud. (Also weasel phrases such as may be, might be, and possibly.)

Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump“), the former Republican political consultant, reminded Twitter how new immigrants actually blend into American society.

Ask son of a Syrian immigrant, Steve Jobs.

Voter fraud fraudsters are so desperate to prove election crimes occured that they will commit them themselves just to prove it.

“Election machine passwords from Mesa County, Colo., mysteriously appeared earlier this month on a right-wing conspiracy website,” the Washington Post Editorial Board reports. In this mini-saga, Tina M. Peters (R), Mesa County’s elected clerk and recorder, allegedly hacked her own county’s voting machines to show how it’s done, and “the county clerk’s presence at the election conspiracy-fest that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held in South Dakota last week does not help her credibility.” Peters is under investigation by both the Colorado Secretary of State’s office and the FBI:

This weird episode appears to pose no ongoing threat to voting security in Mesa County. But it suggests the lengths to which those devoted to the Trumpist lie will go — and the sabotage they could do if they are in positions of responsibility. Across the country, conspiracist candidates are running for election administration jobs, from secretary of state on down. Many Republican gubernatorial and state legislative candidates have also embraced the effort to undermine the credibility of the country’s democratic system by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential contest was rigged. Meanwhile, election workers simply doing their jobs are regularly facing threats to their safety, forcing them to wonder whether an unglamorous administrative job is worth the risk.

Even amid the tribalism of today’s politics, there are still tribunes of hope and sanity. Matt Crane, the Republican head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, condemned the Mesa breach. “There is nothing heroic or honorable about what happened in Mesa County,” he said. “As election officials, we have to be the grownups in the room.” U.S. democracy will no doubt depend once again on public-spirited officials such as Mr. Crane doing their duty against the unrelenting pressure of Mr. Trump and his acolytes.

Public spirit is not dead, just on a ventilator in certain quarters. Republican elections officials I have worked beside are for the most part doing the unsexy work of election administration because they believe in the work as public service. That does not mean that if you press the right buttons some crazy won’t leak out. But for the most part, they keep it in check and keep what they think privately separate from what they do as public officials. It’s the bleacher bums you have to watch out for, Ms. Peters (allegedly) excepted.

That is how it is supposed to work in federal service as well. What Trump and Trumpists encouraged, and Bushies before them, was putting partisanship above citizenship and duty. All that flag-waving and Constitution-clutching is more about allegiance to their team than to their country, whatever lies they believe about themselves.

The GOP is a zombie party, led by King of the Undead, Donald Trump:

Eight years after working to persuade voters who opposed their presidential nominee to give them another look, Republican leaders are opting for a different approach this time around: making it harder for those voters to cast ballots at all.

Mitt Romney’s 4-percentage-point loss to then-President Barack Obama in 2012 triggered a months-long introspective that was presented at the party’s summer meeting in Boston. It called for Republicans to do a better job of reaching out to nonwhite voters who had overwhelming supported Obama and given him a second term.

Yet as the Republican National Committee gathers in Tennessee for this year’s summer meeting, there is zero attempt to produce any such “autopsy” of Donald Trump’s 4-point loss to Joe Biden in November. Instead, party leaders are increasing their calls for “election integrity” ― a push that echoes Trump’s endless lies that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him.

“It’s gone from an autopsy to an assault on democracy,” said Stuart Stevens, a top aide in Romney’s 2012 campaign. “Instead of doing the hard work of getting people to vote for you, let’s make it harder for people who aren’t going to vote for us to vote. That’s what it is.”

The reason for the lack of any formal review, Republicans said, is simple: A former president who does not hesitate to attack members of his party who do not show him absolute fealty.

“They don’t want to piss him off,” said John Ryder, a longtime RNC member from Tennessee who left the 168-member body as it was being taken over by Trump loyalists following his 2016 election.

Romney, a lifelong Republican, was never going to sabotage his party because of a critical report, added one top RNC member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Trump’s not Romney,” the member said. “There are repercussions for saying what’s apparent to most Americans.”

Instead, the RNC created a special committee to track its efforts at “election integrity” ― legislation in states around the country that adds voting restrictions disproportionately affecting poorer and minority communities. The committee met Wednesday and hopes to release a report next week. RNC officials and members said that the issue is the priority for its base, who remain loyal to Trump and who, polling shows, say they believe his easily disproven lies that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud.

“Wherever I go in Florida, it’s the number one thing people ask me about: election integrity,” said Florida RNC member Peter Feaman.

Sally Bradshaw, for more than a decade a top aide to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and one of the authors of the 2013 post-mortem, said she was appalled by the party’s continued embrace of Trump and his most loyal followers.

“Here’s what the base wants to hear? That’s not what public service is,” she said. “Rather than trying to persuade, they’re just trying to manipulate the system. It’s their only way to win. It’s the only option they have. And it’s sickening.” 

You’ll recall that the GOP autopsy in 2012 recommended the party greatly increase its outreach to racial and ethnic minorities as well as women generally. Then Trump came along with his open racism and total disdain for decency and he won:

It’s a lesson that appears to have stuck. Party leaders today ― including potential 2024 candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ― blame migrants entering the country for recent surges in COVID-19 infections, rather than the true culprits: Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Stevens, who worked on both of George W. Bush’s successful presidential campaigns prior to serving as Romney’s chief strategist, said that for too many Republicans, Trump’s popularity with the party base came as a relief after Priebus’s attempts to expand the party.

“They thought: ‘We don’t have to pretend to care about that shit anymore. We can just win with white people,’” he said. “’Thank God. That was exhausting.’” 

Despite Republicans’ optimism about beating Obama in 2012, history suggested it was always a steep climb. Incumbent presidents in modern times rarely lose, which is why Trump’s loss in 2020 was remarkable.

He became just the third post-World War II president to lose reelection and the first since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, the White House and the Senate in a single term. Trump’s loss also extended the GOP’s dismal record in presidential races to seven popular vote losses in eight tries.

Still, Republicans have not commenced an analysis of why Trump lost, notwithstanding the exhaustive study of the 2012 election that had been far more difficult to win.

Stevens praised the 2013 report’s recommendations, despite its criticisms of Romney’s campaign, comparing it to earlier attempts to expand the party, such as former RNC chair Ken Mehlman’s apology to the NAACP in 2005 for the GOP’s decades-long reliance on the racist “Southern Strategy.”

“It was not just a political necessity, but a moral mandate,” he said.

Bradshaw, a lifelong Republican who left politics entirely during the Trump years and now runs a bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida, said the lack of any such review for fear of angering a man who tried to overthrow American democracy after losing his election speaks volumes.ADVERTISEMENT

“It’s why I left the party. Because it’s a cult of personality, not a problem-solving party,” she said. “There’s no long game. There’s no ‘how to grow the party.’ The Republican leadership now is just about the preservation of power in the short-term. The Republican Party is not about ideas anymore. And I’m sad about that.”

Party officials, though, point to their success with nontraditional Republican candidates in the 2020 election in House races, with women and Latinos helping put the party within striking distance of taking back that chamber in 2022.

And the current RNC member who spoke anonymously said leaders are simply being practical. They need to prepare for the midterm elections, and publicly antagonizing Trump is not the way to do it. Besides, RNC leaders are fully aware of what happened in November.

“Trump lost the election. He lost the election that he could have won, with some minor changes,” the member said. “He took a very divisive path, and it cost him the White House. And it ultimately cost the party the Senate. Nobody has to explain that to people. You don’t need a long report to explain what’s obvious.”

But Ryder said the RNC has evolved to a point where a significant number of its members actually believe Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, which he says are readily debunked just by looking at vote totals in historically Republican suburbs populated by college-educated whites all over the country.

He said he personally has found legislative districts in Tennessee that that went for GOP Senate candidate Bill Hagerty but also for Biden at the top of the ticket. “Trump lost because he alienated a lot of Republicans. As long as they’re absorbed in this myth that the election was stolen, you’re not going to understand what happened.”

Ryder added that he does not know, at this point, how the party will get past Trump if it refuses to acknowledge why he lost.

“It’s not healthy at all. If you’re a football team and you lose a game, you review the game film and say, OK, what went wrong? A wise political party looks at that. You’ve got to look at it with clear eyes and a clear head.”

I wish I could read something like this and believe that they will fail spectacularly and sanity will assert itself. For some reason, I am anything but sure of that. I wonder why?

It probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the outcome, but it would have been a good thing for these people to testify in Trump’s second impeachment trial. They knew he was plotting a coup and when it didn’t work he sicced the mob on a joint session of congress:

During Donald Trump’s final weeks in office, top Justice Department officials wrangled over how the FBI should handle a particularly wacky voter fraud allegation promoted by the then-president and his allies. Unreleased emails obtained by POLITICO show just how tense the episode got.

The dispute pitted a senior career section chief against one of the DOJ’s top officials, with the FBI caught in the crossfire. Trump’s appointees at DOJ ultimately prevailed, and their investigation — a probe into a viral video from Georgia that didn’t actually find any evidence of fraud — ended up playing a role in torpedoing the president’s narrative. While Trump’s opponents fretted that the FBI’s involvementwould undermine public confidence in elections and boost Republican talking points, it had the opposite effect.

At the time of the email dispute, Trump and his allies were lobbing a host of allegations about voter fraud, claiming wide-reaching and nefarious forces had conspired to steal the election for Biden. One allegation in particular commanded the president’s attention:a video showing election workers counting ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Trump’s allies claimed it showed the workers secretly pulling ballots out of “suitcases” and using them to commit election fraud.

Officials in the office of Georgia’s secretary of state quickly debunked those claims. But on Dec. 5, Trump alluded to the video at a rally in Georgia, suggesting it proved poll workers were stuffing ballot boxes to help the Democrats.

Two days later, at 12:34 a.m. on Dec. 7, the head of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section (PIN) — which oversees investigations of voter fraud, along with a host of other issues — sent a four-paragraph email to an FBI official. Lawyers in the section had learned that FBI agents planned to interview people who appeared in a video showing votes being counted at State Farm Arena in Georgia –– a video Georgia’s secretary of state had already investigated. The email doesn’t give much detail about the video, but it appears to be discussing the same one that Trump referenced at his rally on Dec. 5.

The head of PIN — Corey Amundson, a career official with two decades of law enforcement experience — wrote that his team did not want the FBI to investigate the video.

“[Secretary of State] investigators have already conducted recorded interviews of the individuals at issue and such interviews reportedly revealed nothing to suggest nefarious activity with regard to the integrity of the election,” Amundson wrote. “The FBI ‘re-interviewing’ those individuals at this point and under the current circumstances risks great damage to the Department’s reputation, including the possible appearance of being motivated by partisan concerns.”

Before Attorney General William Barr took over, the DOJ had a long-standing approach to voter fraud probes: Agents waited to open these investigations until the elections were over, ballots were cast, and winners were certified. The policy was meant to stave off the perception that the FBI was deciding who won elections.

But the rules had changed.On Nov. 9, 2020, a few days after the networks called the election for Joe Biden,Barr issued a memo letting the FBI investigate some voter fraud allegations much more quickly. The move caused some distress in the department’s Criminal Division, as The Washington Post reported at the time.

As the FBI began executing Barr’s new policy, Amundson’s concerns quickly escalated to the highest levels of the Bureau. Shortly after 8 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 7, David Bowdich — the FBI’s second-in-command — emailed Richard Donoghue, a top DOJ official and a political appointee, about the conflict.

“This is putting us in a bad spot,” Bowdich wrote. “We need to get this PIN issue settled as to how to proceed. I feel like we are operating under an antiquated thought process here. Everyone understood that before the election we should not do these types of inquiries, but we are in a place right now in this election cycle in which these types of allegations are important to vet out, particularly when many in the country are still questioning the results.”

Donoghue replied to Bowdich a few hours later.

“It is antiquated indeed,” he wrote. He then noted that lawyers in Amundson’s section had pushed back against Barr’s November memo speeding up the FBI’s involvement in some election fraud cases. But, Donoghue continued, this wasn’t their call — it was the attorney general’s.

Barr had told Donoghue that the FBI needed to conduct some interviews about the State Farm allegations rather than relying solely on the secretary of state’s investigation, he informed Bowdich.

“It may well be that the GA SOS is correct in concluding that nothing nefarious happened there,” Donoghue continued, “but the fact is that millions of Americans have come to believe (rightly or wrongly) that something untoward took place and it is incumbent on the Department to timely conduct a limited investigation to assure the American people that we have looked at these claims.”

“If we come to the same conclusion as the GA SOS, then that should give the public increased confidence in the election results in GA,” Donoghue argued. “If we come to a different conclusion, then we’ll deal with that. Either way, the AG made it clear that he wants to be sure that we are actually doing our job and not just standing on the sidelines.”

Donoghue then repeated that this wasn’t up to Amundson.

“Moreover, given that the AG has specifically directed that the FBI conduct some interviews here (he leaves the number and depth of the interviews entirely up to the FBI), the decision has been made,” he wrote. “We all have a chain of command for a reason.”

He ended with a note of sympathy.

“Sorry that you and your team have been dragged into this again,” he concluded. “Unfortunately, this is the reality of working here these days.”

Donoghue then forwarded the email chain to Byung Jin “Bjay” Pak, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, which includes Atlanta. “JFYI,” he wrote. “Please do not forward.”

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform obtained these emails and planned to interview Donoghue. But then its probe of these matters was abruptly shut down.

Pak, who answered Senate investigators’ questions virtually on Wednesday, would go on to become a minor character in Trump’s futile attempt to overturn the election results. He resigned on Jan. 3, as the president pushed him to pursue the claims of voter fraud, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Barr’s decision to have the DOJ charge ahead on voter fraud investigations also proved consequential. Even before the internal debate over the Georgia video, the FBI had scrutinized other allegations and found them unpersuasive. And in an interview with the AP published December 1, 2020, Barr said he’d seen no evidence of fraud that could have changed the election’s outcome.

The FBI kept investigating fraud allegations after Barr made those comments, as these new emails show. And Georgia and Pak in particular drew significant attention from the Justice Department — and from Trump himself.

By the start of the New Year, Barr had resigned and leadership of the department had fallen to his deputy Jeffrey Rosen, who soon became entangled in the president’s efforts — efforts he successfully stiff-armed.

Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show Rosen had emailed Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark Pak’s cell phone number with the subject line “atlanta” on Jan. 1, 2021, after then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had asked Rosen to have Clark pursue voter fraud allegations in Georgia.

On Jan. 2, Rosen followed up with Clark about his call with Pak, and then later that day, Trump appeared to refer to Pak as a “never-Trumper U.S. Attorney” in a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The evening after a tumultuous Jan. 3 White House meeting between top Justice Department officials and Trump, Donoghue emailed Pak with the subject line “Please call ASAP.”

Pak submitted his resignation the next morning.

Bill Barr. the coward, really covered himself in glory, didn’t he?

We see once again that voter fraud hucksters are so committed to their hustle that, just to prove cheating is possible, they will commit the very election crimes they claim are committed by legions of Others.

Tim Miller explains the “all-time self-own” at The Bulwark:

The lede in Monday’s Grand Junction Sentinel brings the Kraken: “The Mesa County Clerk’s Office is under investigation…for a breach in security over its election system.”

A breach! It’s Happening!!!

But no, the breach wasn’t coming from the anti-Trump deep state. Instead, the clerk who is under investigation for tampering with the county election system is Tina Peters, a fervent supporter of Donald Trump and amateur vaccine science aficionado, who appears to have executed a self-own of historic proportion.

Last week Gateway Pundit reported that Q himself…errr “CodeMonkeyZ” Ron Watkins…posted a video and a few screenshots to his Telegram that had been provided by a “whistleblower.” The posts were supposed to demonstrate that Dominion Voting Systems machines could in fact be connected to the internet, which is a necessary but not sufficient element in support of their bat guano theory of election fraud.

The grainy, shaky video presented a conversation between an election official and a Dominion employee, in which the election official asks a series of leading questions in order to demonstrate how, with the help of someone on the inside, the machine could hypothetically be tampered with over the internet using the BIOS motherboard settings.

When the official shared this “bombshell” video with CodeMonkey Watkins they included in it an image of their election system’s BIOS password, which is, of course, a massive breach of voting system security.

What the “whistleblower” did not realize was that the password was unique. The office of Secretary of State Jena Griswold traced it to the county behind the leak and, eventually, to Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who is now under investigation.

Denver Post:

Griswold says the posts do not imminently threaten Colorado’s election security but require investigation. She has ordered Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to allow the Secretary of State’s Office to change equipment passwords and turn over all surveillance footage of the election equipment between May 24 and Aug. 9, along with access logs and chain-of-custody logs.

The sweeping order also requires Peters to hand over any communications, including texts and voicemails, in which she or her staff discussed Dominion or the alleged breach, along with all background checks on clerk’s office employees. Peters must do so by Thursday.

Peters, a Republican, had posted a series of since-deleted, full-on-MAGA tweets claiming the 2020 election was “planned fraud on a grand scale,” that ballots can be counted more than once, and Dominion Voting machines easliy hacked. And voting in her office? Days after the election, she reported everything had gone cleanly and her audits passed with flying colors, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

It is another self-own in the grand tradition of James O’Keefe, Professional Person Impersonator. O’Keefe and three accomplices were arrested and convicted in 2010 for passing themselves off as telephone repairmen to gain access to the federal office of Sen. Mary Landrieu in New Orleans.

O’Keefe in 2016 secretly videoed himself impersonating one “Brian Dickerson,” a columnist for the Detroit Free Press at Dickerson’s polling place in a Detroit suburb. Cindy Rose, a veteran poll worker who knew the real Dickerson, suggested that if he had lost his driver’s license on a hunting trip (as O’Keefe claimed), he could sign an affidavit attesting to being Dickerson and cast a provisional ballot. (Rose had already called the city clerk’s office to verify that the real Dickerson had already cast his ballot. ) Had O’Keefe signed, that act would have been a felony, as both Rose and O’Keefe well knew. O’Keefe walked out instead.

Voter fraud fraudsters are so desperate to prove election crimes occured that they will commit them themselves just to prove it. Most are less slick than O’Keefe.

Even OG Villager Ruth Marcus is alarmed:

What happened on Jan. 6 was horrifying: an attempted coup, inflamed by social media, incited by the defeated president and televised in real time. What happened before Jan. 6, we are coming to learn, was equally horrifying: a slow-motion attempted coup, plotted in secret at the pinnacle of government and foiled by the resistance of a few officials who would not accede to Donald Trump’s deluded view of the election outcome.

That is the unnerving picture that is only beginning to fully emerge of what was happening behind the scenes as Trump, enraged by his loss, schemed to overturn clear election results with the connivance of not only top White House aides but also senior officials at the Justice Department who were maneuvering around their chain of command to bolster Trump’s efforts.

Which raises the most disturbing question: What if? What if the senior Trump-installed officials at the Justice Department, notably acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, had been more willing to put loyalty to Trump over the rule of law? What happens, God forbid, next time, when the outcome may be further muddied thanks to changed state laws shifting power from election officials to partisan legislators?

I try not to be alarmist, but it is difficult to read the latest accounts and not be alarmed. The drip-drip-drip evolution of this story has served to mask how serious the threat was and how close it came to fruition.

We have known for months that Trump — heedless of constraints on hijacking Justice Department operations to his own political ends — had pressed Justice officials to intervene on his behalf. For example, he urged Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud.

We knew that when Rosen balked, Trump entertained a plan to oust Rosen and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who was more willing to push Trump’s fanciful assertions of fraud. We knew that Trump was deterred only after threats of mass resignations from other officials.

We knew that Clark had drafted a letter to Georgia state legislators asserting that the department was investigating claims of fraud in the state.

The cockamamie letter itself recently emerged. Dated Dec. 28, 2020, it stated that the department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.” This despite the conclusion by Attorney General William P. Barr, before he resigned that month, that the department’s investigation had not uncovered “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

The Clark letter not only urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) to call the legislature into special session to consider “this important and urgent matter” but also advised the legislature of its “implied authority under the Constitution of the United States to call itself into special session for the limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors.” It was to be signed by Rosen, acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue and Clark himself.

Clark had insisted that his dealings with the White House were “consistent with law” and that he had merely participated in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

This is not how things are supposed to work. At a normal Justice Department, the head of the civil division, rungs down the organization chart, does not end-run the attorney general to have “candid discussions” with the president. At a normal Justice Department, there are guardrails in place to prevent this sort of improper interference by the president.

Now we are getting accounts of what happened in those frenzied final days from Rosen himself. Over the weekend, he hastened to testify to the Justice Department inspector general and the Senate Judiciary Committee before Trump could seek to interpose assertions of executive privilege. Rosen’s former deputy, Donoghue, also appeared before the Senate panel. The testimony was behind closed doors, but as we learn more of what was said, I suspect there will be even more reason to be concerned about what might have been.

Will that always be the case? Will the country be able to dodge future bullets, from Trump or his successors? I would like to think so. But if there is anything the past five years have shown, it is the disappointing fecklessness of too many of those in power in the face of the Trumpist onslaught.

My favorite aspect of this is the fact that the coward Bill Barr ran out on his responsibility to stop all this and left the mess to Rosen and his deputy. What a guy.

It was real, very real. And very specific — Dick Durbin, today

From the New York Times:

Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews.

Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday.

The investigations were opened after a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that continuing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That prompted Mr. Trump to consider ousting Mr. Rosen and installing Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.

Mr. Trump never fired Mr. Rosen, but the plot highlights the former president’s desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda.

Mr. Clark, who did not respond to requests for comment, said in January that all of his official communications with the White House “were consistent with law,” and that he had engaged in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”

Mr. Rosen did not respond to requests for comment. The inspector general’s spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Rosen has emerged as a key witness in multiple investigations that focus on Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the results of the election. He has publicly stated that the Justice Department did not find enough fraud to affect the outcome of the election.

On Friday Mr. Rosen told investigators from the inspector general’s office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again, according to a person familiar with the interview.

Mr. Rosen also described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview.

He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia. Mr. Clark drafted a letter that he asked Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators, wrongly asserting that they should void Mr. Biden’s victory because the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in the state.

Such a letter would effectively undermine efforts by Mr. Clark’s colleagues to prevent the White House from overturning the election results, and Mr. Rosen and his top deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, rejected the proposal.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said Mr. Rosen discussed previously reported episodes, including his interactions with Mr. Clark, with the Senate Judiciary Committee. He called Mr. Rosen’s account “dramatic evidence of how intent Trump was in overthrowing the election.” […[

Mr. Blumenthal said Mr. Rosen presented new facts and evidence that led him to believe that the committee would need to answer “profound and important questions” about the roles that individuals in Mr. Trump’s orbit played in the effort to undermine the peaceful transition of power, “which is what Trump tried to do, intently and concertedly.”

Mr. Rosen has spent much of the year in discussions with the Justice Department over what information he could provide to investigators, given that decision-making conversations between administration officials are usually kept confidential.

Douglas A. Collins, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said last week that the former president would not seek to bar former Justice Department officials from speaking with investigators. But Mr. Collins said he might take some undisclosed legal action if congressional investigators sought “privileged information.”

Mr. Rosen quickly scheduled interviews with congressional investigators to get as much of his version of events on the record before any players could ask the courts to block the proceedings, according to two people familiar with those discussions who are not authorized to speak about continuing investigations.

It’s unclear what kind of accountability there could be for Clark. In a just world he would at least be disbarred and shunned. But it’s more likely he’ll be hailed as a hero on the right.