President Donald Trump pressed senior officials in the Department of Justice to declare the November 2020 election “corrupt” in a phone call on December 27, according to handwritten notes from one official on the call. The notes were released on Friday by the House Oversight Committee.
“Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me,” Trump told then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the deputy attorney general.
Though the Justice Department is supposed to work independently from the White House, the December phone call shows how the former president tried to overturn the election results using his presidential power.
“These handwritten 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,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), a chairman of the House Oversight Committee chairman, said in a statement.
It appears the officials rejected Trump’s request and did not act on any of his requests.
On Thursday, the Justice Department told the IRS to hand over Trump’s tax returns to Congress.
