Trump reportedly called acting AG nearly every day about voter fraud claims
After the November election, former President Donald Trump called then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen on almost a daily basis to tell him about claims of voter fraud, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
During these calls in late 2020 and early 2021, Trump asked Rosen what the Justice Department was doing about the allegations, the people said. At the time, Trump and his supporters were working overtime in an attempt to stop the certification of the election results, and the Post reports that the calls stopped after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Rosen listened to what Trump had to say, but never said he planned on taking any action, the Post reports. He would often try to change the topic, but Trump was "absolutely obsessed about it," a person with knowledge of the matter told the Post. One of Rosen's top aides, Richard Donoghue, was there for some of the calls, and wrote notes. Unless Trump moves to block those notes from being made public, they could be turned over to congressional committees investigating Trump's actions after the November election, the Post says.
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Those same committees could also question Rosen and Donoghue, who both recently received letters from the Justice Department saying they are authorized to provide information they learned while at the DOJ, including any knowledge about attempts to involve the department in challenging or overturning the election results, the Post reports.
Rosen testified before Congress in May, and said that while he was acting attorney general, "no special prosecutors were appointed, whether for election fraud or otherwise; no public statements were made questioning the election; no letters were sent to state officials seeking to overturn the election results; [and] no DOJ court actions or filings were submitted seeking to overturn election results."
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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