Trump won't make the same mistake twice

He will be sure to appoint certified loyalists to lead his Justice Department if he wins in 2024, and God help us if he does.

A lengthy report from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week spelled out just how close we came to a “Sunday Night Massacre” at the Department of Justice.  During a three-hour meeting held after dark in the Oval Office on January 3, just days before the Wednesday afternoon massacre at the Capitol, Donald Trump threatened to fire Jeffrey Rosen as Acting Attorney General and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, a junior official at Justice with whom he had been conspiring to steal the election in Georgia, which he had lost by more than 11,000 votes.

Only the threat of mass resignations of the top leaders at Justice, along with the threatened resignations of his own White House Counsel and Deputy Counsel, Pat A. Cippolone and Patrick F. Philbin, stopped what Cippolone had told Trump amounted to a “murder-suicide pact.” 

Since the resignation of William Barr in mid-December, Trump had been after Acting Attorney General Rosen and other officials to go along with a scheme hatched by a lawyer Trump had seen on Fox News to overthrow the election in Georgia and use that move to challenge the elections in other battleground states he had lost.  The Fox News lawyer, John Eastman, had convinced Trump that if they could illegally overturn the Georgia election, challenges in other battleground states could be used to convince state legislatures to invalidate their slates of electors and throw out the certification of Electoral College results on January 6.

Trump and his allies had placed multiple calls every day to Justice Department officials since Barr’s resignation trying to get them to involve the department in Eastman’s scheme.  On the same day Barr resigned, December 14, Trump had an aide email Jeffrey Rosen two phony items challenging the results of the Michigan election, which Trump had lost.  One was a set of talking points outlining claims of voter fraud that had been thrown out of court after a lawsuit filed by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.  The other was an allegation of problems with Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan.  Both sets of claims had been rejected by courts in Michigan already, but Trump and his secret ally in the department, Clark, were still pushing them.

Trump had already been pressuring Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to investigate purported fraud in Cobb County, and he had been on the phone to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger trying to get him to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.  He had also been pressuring the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, to investigate phony fraud claims being made by Trump allies in the state.  When Pak refused, Trump threatened to fire him and replace him with a man serving as a U.S. Attorney in Savannah who had contributed to his presidential campaign.  Pak would end up resigning the day after the January 3 meeting in the Oval Office.

Trump’s pressure offensive on the Department of Justice continued throughout December into early January, when Acting Attorney General Rosen became aware that Trump was planning to replace him with Clark, who had been one of his deputies.  Rosen demanded the meeting with Trump, which took place on January 3.  According to the report of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump began the meeting by blurting, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”

Rosen and his chief deputy, Richard P. Donoghue both threatened to resign if Clark was appointed to replace him.  They told Trump that the other top deputy attorneys general in the department were prepared to resign as well.  Trump finally caved in when his own White House Counsel and Deputy Counsel told him they would join in the mass resignation of Justice Department officials if Trump replaced Rosen.

Almost immediately after the meeting was over, Trump sent Deputy Attorney General Donoghue another memo alleging that the Department of Homeland Security had found a truckload of shredded ballots somewhere near Atlanta.  Donoghue told the Senate committee he looked into the allegation and found it to be false, like every other allegation Trump had made.

Trump is currently under investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, for his attempts to fraudulently overturn the election in that state.  The office of the Fulton County district attorney has gathered documents and interviewed officials from the office of Secretary of State Raffensberger, whom Trump had pressured to help him overturn the election.  A Trump ally, Representative Jody Hice, has announced that he is challenging Raffensberger for the office of Secretary of State in the upcoming Republican primary.  Trump has already endorsed Hice and is helping to raise money for him.

Whatever happens in Georgia, Trump will not make the mistake of appointing professional prosecutors to positions of power in the Department of Justice if he succeeds in his expected run for president in 2024.  If Trump wins, the next leaders of the Department of Justice will make political hacks like Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions look like saints.  We’ll be looking at FBI crackdowns on dissent, the criminalization of libel laws, anti-trust suits against mainstream media companies like the New York Times, NBC, CNN and the Washington Post, and possibly arrests of protest leaders and journalists. 

The next Trump administration, should there be one, will make Nixon and the Plumbers look like the good old days of democracy and freedom.

This is yet another plea to everyone reading this for free to subscribe. You will be helping me continue to make this newsletter a champion of democracy and an enemy of anyone who would challenge our freedom.