Donoghue notes show Trump pressing Rosen, Justice on election-fraud claims

By Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey,

President Trump pressed senior Justice Department officials in late 2020 to declare the election corrupt even as those officials pushed back, warning the president that many of the claims he was hearing about voter fraud were false, according to notes taken by an aide who participated in the discussions.

The notes were released to Congress this week and made public on Friday — further evidence of the pressure Trump brought to bear as he sought to throw out President Biden’s election victory.

In one Dec. 27 conversation, according to the written account, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen told Trump the Justice Department “can’t + won’t snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election.”

The president replied that he understood that, but wanted the agency to “just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” according to notes of the conversation taken by another senior Justice Department official, Richard Donoghue.

The Washington Post revealed the existence of the notes and the phone calls on Wednesday, reporting previously undisclosed details of the president’s personal pressure campaign to enlist the Justice Department in his battle to undo the 2020 election results.

[As Trump pushed to overturn election, he called his acting AG almost daily]

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said the 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.”

The Dec. 27 call was not the only time that the president and Rosen discussed Trump’s claims of voter fraud, according to people familiar with the discussions. But the notes by Donoghue, who participated in that call and some others, provide a detailed account of what was said in that conversation.

“We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt, election,” Trump said, according to the notes. He also suggested darkly that he might replace Rosen as acting attorney general, and mentioned as a possible replacement a different senior Justice Department lawyer.

“People tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership,” Trump said, according to the notes. Donoghue replied that changing leadership would not change the department’s position, according to the notes.

As Rosen and Donoghue repeatedly told the president that specific claims of voter fraud he had heard were false, Trump said, “You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do,” according to the notes. He also said people are angry and “blaming DOJ + for inaction.”

[See Richard Donoghue’s handwritten notes of the Dec. 27 phone call]

Trump and his lawyers could have sought to block the release of Donoghue’s notes to Congress. There were days of discussion among Trump advisers about whether to do so, but the former president did not believe the notes showed anything problematic, even though some of his advisers feared the disclosures would be damaging.

“If it gets more attention on the election, he welcomes it,” one adviser said.

At least some of the former Justice Department officials with knowledge of the phone conversations had privately hoped Trump would seek to block the sharing of the notes, to prevent those former officials from having to testify on Capitol Hill about the exchanges, said people familiar with their thinking. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

But Trump did not attempt to stop the release of the notes.

A Trump spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

*** This article has been archived for your research. The original version from The Washington Post can be found here ***