Former President Donald Trump pushed the Department of Justice to directly ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Joe Biden’s election win, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.
The effort was part of Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department in his final weeks in office to overturn his election loss which also included plans to fire then-acting Attorney General Jeffery Rosen with a relatively unknown Justice Department lawyer who was willing to use the department to support Trump’s false claims about election fraud in Georgia, two people briefed on the matter told CNN.
The effort ultimately failed as Trump appointees in the Department of Justice refused to file the lawsuit, according to the Journal. Rosen, along with former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, refused to file the Supreme Court case citing that there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and the federal government had no legal interest in whether Trump or Biden won the presidency.
Trump also backed down during the New Year’s weekend effort after top Justice Department officials, including Trump’s own Senate-confirmed appointees and other political staff, vowed to resign if Trump fired Rosen.
The move would have represented Trump’s most flagrant intrusion on Justice Department matters, after years of breaking with decades-long presidential tradition of trying to limit plainly partisan political activity by the department.
“He wanted us, the United States, to sue one or more of the states directly in the Supreme Court,” a former administration official told the Journal. “The pressure got really intense” after a lawsuit Texas filed in the Supreme Court against four states Biden won was dismissed in early December, the official told the Journal.
Source: cnn.com
The post Wall Street Journal: Trump pressured DOJ to file case with Supreme Court to overturn election results appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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