former acting attorney trumps efforts subvert

GROSS: Yeah, let's talk about that plot a little bit. And this time, it was going to eventuate in the ouster of the acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen, so that the president could put Mr. And he secretly met with the president again. Nevertheless, Clark continued to speak to the White House despite the fact that he was not supposed to. 2 at the department, Rich Donoghue - told Jeff Clark that what he was doing was wrong. So they met to discuss Jeff Clark's behavior - his refusal to hew to the department's conclusion that the election results were valid, his decision to continually contact the White House without permission. And instead, Jeff Clark had been doing this in secret. The White House and the Justice Department are to communicate only through very official channels, and, you know, the attorney general would be notified. And they didn't understand why Jeff Clark had been going around them secretly to have these meetings with the president, which is also a violation of Justice Department policy. The Justice Department's own investigations had not borne this out. They felt that, you know, one, this wasn't true. And they wanted to talk to him because they had finally realized that he was trying to work with the president to send a letter to Georgia that would basically imply that the Justice Department felt that the election results in that state were invalid.Īs you can imagine, they were extremely upset about this.

He was the acting head of the Civil Division. Very few people outside of the department knew anything about him. What was the New Year's Eve meeting about in the Justice Department? And this is New Year's Eve 2020.īENNER: So on New Year's Eve, Justice Department officials met with a man named Jeff Clark. GROSS: Let's start with the story you broke that led to the ongoing investigations into Trump. Pak, had just told the Senate Judiciary Committee in a closed-door session that his abrupt resignation on January 4 had been prompted by a warning from DOJ officials that Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia. Later in the day, Benner reported that a former U.S. We recorded our interview yesterday morning. Her article was about the culture of harassment in Silicon Valley. We're going to talk about what has been revealed so far, who else is involved and what the legal consequences might be.īenner won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for a contribution to the Times' reporting on sexual harassment.

She also reported that Clark had plotted with President Trump to oust the acting attorney general, replace him with Clark and use the Justice Department's power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.īenner covers the Justice Department for the Times and has been continuing to report on these investigations into Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election and what she describes as the former president's desire to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. That article revealed that Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department's Civil Division, tried to get DOJ leaders to falsely claim that investigations into voter fraud in Georgia cast doubt on the Electoral College results.

My guest, New York Times reporter Katie Benner, broke the story that led two investigations. Donald Trump's attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and declare himself the winner are being investigated by the Department of Justice's inspector general, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Former acting attorney trumps efforts subvert