[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 177 (Thursday, October 7, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6951-S6952]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ELECTIONS
Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, today, the Senate Judiciary Committee
released a report after an investigation of the circumstances
surrounding Donald Trump's efforts to take over the Justice Department
during the closing days of the last calendar year and beginning of this
year.
Since January, the Committee has investigated reports that White
House officials, including the President himself, pressed the
Department of Justice to support President Trump's unsubstantiated bids
to overturn the 2020 election results, and that Acting Civil Division
Assistant AG Jeffrey Clark aided in that effort.
Today's interim staff report sheds new light on former President
Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Jeffrey Clark
became Donald Trump's Big Lie lawyer, pressuring his colleagues in the
Department of Justice to force an overturn of the 2020 election.
Let me put this in perspective. The election was in November. The
results were announced. Most of the world accepted it, but the former
President, Donald Trump, never did. He filed a succession of lawsuits
to prove that the election had been stolen. He failed in every effort
in court. That was stage one.
Having failed in court with some of the most outlandish theories
imaginable, but considered normal for the likes of Rudy Giuliani, they
went into the second phase. The second phase was to coerce the
Department of Justice and the Attorney General to intervene in the
election results and to reach out directly, as the President did
himself personally, to the election officials in States where he
thought he should have won but he didn't.
So all that effort was under way when William Barr, President Trump's
Attorney General at the time, issued a statement saying there was no
evidence of widespread fraud in the election. That was disappointing to
the President.
It occurred that in the middle of December of last year, William
Barr, the Attorney General, announced that he was going to resign as of
December 23. A man was chosen as the Acting Attorney General, Jeffrey
Rosen, and Richard Donoghue as Deputy Attorney General.
There was a full court press on at that time by President Trump and
his supporters to influence Jeffrey Rosen into intervening into this
election contest. When I say ``full court press,'' I am talking about
repeated telephone calls and meetings in the White House over a period
of 2 weeks.
This report, which we have brought to the attention of the public, as
well as members of the Committee, obviously, went into detail as to
what happened during that 2-week period of time. It was an incredible
moment, which most Americans didn't even know was going on. We were a
half step away from a full-blown constitutional crisis because what the
President was trying to do was to convince the Attorney General to
contact the leaders in the States where he thought--the President
thought he had won the election and to tell them to not certify the
results and to pick an alternative set of electors in some instances.
In each of these cases, the President was--President Trump--pushing a
theory on why he actually won. These theories went from crazy to silly,
to outlandish.
Let me give you one of them. It was called Italy-gate. I hope you
caught this one because, naturally, Rudy Giuliani was somehow involved
with this--some notion that Italian satellites were intercepting the
voting machines in America and changing the results against Donald
Trump. That is the nature of things.
In the State of Georgia, the President and his supporters were
arguing that they have videotapes proving that people brought in
suitcases full of ballots, and they showed these videotapes. The
election officials in Georgia--which, I might add, all Republican--
countered that by saying that those were actual containers of ballots
and that was the ordinary process; there was nothing sinister going on
there.
State after State, case after case, Trump was making the argument
that he was cheated out of the election--which, of course, was false,
but he still believes it to this day--and putting the pressure on
Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to be complicit in this plot. He
even asked him to consider filing a special case in the Supreme Court
across the street to stop the election results from being certified.
Our report shows that Jeffrey Rosen and his Deputy, Richard Donoghue,
resisted this from the start. Jeffrey Clark, another Assistant Attorney
General in the Civil Division who had nothing, literally, to do with
this matter on a legal basis, were in conflict from that point--Clark,
on the side of Trump, saying that the letters to the States should be
issued, and Rosen and Donoghue arguing that there was no basis in fact,
no proof of election fraud that could warrant that kind of
unprecedented action.
In the meantime, many other players, like Mark Meadows in the White
House, were also pressuring the Department of Justice. The net result
of it was a fateful day--I believe it was January 3 of this year--when
the President called Rosen, Donoghue, and Clark to the White House to
pursue his effort to replace Rosen with Clark, a more complicit person
in the process.
At that moment, two things happened that were significant. The White
House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, dissented from the President's position
and said it was a murder-suicide pact for him to engage in this.
Secondly, at that point, the eight leading officials in the Department
of Justice all said that they would resign en masse if there was a
replacement of the Acting Attorney General by Mr. Clark.
The President hesitated and decided at the very last minute not to
pursue that course, not to replace him. That was significant, I will
tell you, because had it happened otherwise, there would have been a
possibility that there would have been a contest on the election
results.
What did the President do next after deciding that? Well, just for
good measure, he ended up forcing the resignation of the U.S. attorney
in Georgia who refused to buy his outlandish claims. It was the
President's way of protesting that particular U.S. attorney's--Mr.
Cox--independence in the situation.
What followed? We know what followed. In a matter of 3 days, this
President, former President, desperate in his situation, having failed
in every court case, having failed to take over the Department of
Justice, decided to take his cause to the streets. We saw it in the
U.S. Capitol 3 days later on January 6. The President turned loose a
mob--a mob that was supposed to stop us from counting the electoral
votes and electoral ballots.
Most people say: Well, we heard most of this story before, so what is
the point of it? The point of it is that we were so close to a
constitutional crisis at that moment that it bears continued
investigation and disclosure so the
[[Page S6952]]
American people know that we should never be complacent when it comes
to our rights as citizens and to our responsibilities to our
Constitution.
This President, former President Donald Trump, would have shredded
the Constitution to keep his office in the Presidency. There is no
doubt in my mind.
To think that we reached that stage in history is certainly worth
reflection for a moment. What more should we do going forward to make
certain that we protect this democracy from the likes of Donald Trump
or any of his successors in interest? That, I think, is a major
responsibility that we face.
I hope this report from the Senate Judiciary Committee will reopen
the conversation. I hope as well that the select committee of the House
on the January 6 occurrence, the mob insurrection here at the Capitol--
we submitted this evidence to them. I hope it is a benefit to them as
they move forward.
I certainly hope that, on a bipartisan basis, we can decide that the
ordinary course of action with a valid, legal election deciding the
future of this country is always the best route in a democracy.
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