Executive Summary

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

The Select Committee’s task was to look into the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th insurrection. They found 17 key findings:

1. From election night through January 6th, 2021, Trump purposely lied about the results of the 2020 election in order to help overturn the election and raise money from his followers.

2. Trump refused to accept the election results and actively plotted to overturn those results.

3. Even though he knew it was illegal, Trump pressured Mike Pence to refuse the counting of electoral votes.

4. Trump tried to use the Department of Justice to overturn the election.

5. Trump pressured state officials and legislators to change election results.

6. Trump led the effort to send false electoral certificates to Congress.

7. Trump pressured members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors.

8. Trump purposely verified false information filed in court.

9. Trump brought tens of thousands of supporters to Washington, D.C. on January 6th and told them to march to the Capitol to “take back” their country.

10. As the insurrection was underway, Trump posted an incendiary message on Twitter condemning Pence, knowing full well it would incite further violence.

11. Trump refused to call off his supporters during the insurrection and instead watched the chaos unfold on TV.

12. All of these actions by Trump were part of a multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful 2020 election results.

13. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were aware of the potential for violence on January 6th.

14. Antifa or other left-wing groups were not involved in the insurrection.

15. No amount of analysis or intelligence gathering could have prepared law enforcement for Trump’s actions and how he exacerbated violence on the 6th.

16. The Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police helped avert a larger crisis, but they were insufficiently staffed to address the mob.

17. Although Trump had the authority to deploy the National Guard, he never gave that order.

The report begins with an overview of these findings, followed by eight chapters with (exhaustive) evidence detailing the main parts of Trump’s plan. The Select Committee then offers criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. They also evaluate the credibility of witnesses and why the DOJ should look into efforts of obstruction. Finally, they end the report by providing some legislative recommendations which can help prevent another January 6th in the future.

Executive Summary: Overview of the Evidence Developed

The main takeaway here is that Trump was the central cause of the insurrection. Without him, there’d be no January 6th.

They start with The Big Lie. On election night, Trump’s inner circle said that he should wait to see how the results look, but Trump wanted to claim victory in order to stop legal votes from being counted. This was a premeditated move, not a spontaneous decision. Those close to Trump understood there was no chance of him winning the election, and they told Trump he lost. Trump recognized he lost and that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The DOJ looked into all the various claims, but they found no evidence for any major fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Nonetheless, Trump continued to push the lie that he won.

With no proof to back up his claims, Trump turned to a new legal team (led by Rudy Giuliani) who made all sorts of false accusations of fraud. Trump went on to lose court case after court case, all because his arguments lacked merit. Even Giuliani admitted during his deposition that there was no definitive proof of election fraud. I love this line from the report: “Not a single witness — nor any combination of witnesses — provided the Select Committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any State” (20). This is followed by a pretty sassy endnote that closes with: “Not one of them provided evidence raising genuine questions about the election outcome. In short, it was all a scam” (142).

This didn’t stop Trump from continuing to lie about the election results. By mid-December 2020, Trump’s team was advising him to concede since they all knew (even Trump!) that he had lost. What follows next in the report is pretty amazing: six pages of quotes comparing what Trump knew versus what Trump said, all proving that Trump willingly and knowingly lied about supposed voter fraud.

Around this time, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee sent hundreds of emails to millions of people claiming that the election was rigged and asking for donations. Between the election and January 6th, Trump fundraised over $250 million.

Rather than concede, Trump took a series of very specific steps to try to overturn the election. His main focus was to pressure Pence (who, as Vice President, was also the President of the Senate) to prevent Congress from counting electoral votes. (There’s then a quick rundown of how the electoral college works. One key takeaway here: The Constitution is clear that the Vice President and Congress serve only a ministerial role in this process — they can’t decide which votes to count, or who should be the winner, etc.)

John Eastman, even though he knew this was illegal, suggested that the Vice President could choose to not count certain states’ electoral votes, namely from states Biden won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And even though Trump was repeatedly told that Eastman’s plan was illegal, Trump continued to pressure Pence in the weeks leading up to January 6th.

On the morning of January 6th, Pence and Trump spoke on the phone. Pence reiterated he wasn’t going to go through with Trump’s plan, and Trump called him a pussy. Later that morning, during his speech at the Ellipse, Trump ad-libbed five different messages about Pence, mostly hoping that Pence would “do the right thing” (37). This riled up the crowd even more, which is when they began their march to the Capitol. Then, at 2:24pm, when Trump tweeted that Pence lacked the courage to change the outcome of the election, the crowd turned into a mob: They surged past the security line and broke into the Capitol.

(The Select Committee then notes that in the course of investigating these facts, Eastman sued to prevent the Committee from obtaining his emails. A Federal District Court judge reviewed the emails and the Committee’s evidence, then ruled that Trump likely violated two criminal statutes: corruptly obstructing the official proceeding of electoral votes, and conspiring to defraud the United States.)

In the lead-up to January 6th, thinking that the Eastman plan would happen, Trump worked to prepare false electoral slates. The purpose of those fake slates was so that on January 6th when Pence was counting results, he’d open both the real electoral slates for Biden along with the fake electoral slates for Trump. Faced with this apparent contradiction, Pence, as President of the Senate, could then either act as an arbiter and choose to certify the Trump slates OR ask the states to recertify their results for Trump.

The false slates from fake Republican electors were created on December 14, 2020 — the same day the certified electors were creating the real slates. Five states mailed in false slates, and a sixth’s (Wisconsin’s) went to Senator Ron Johnson and Representative Mike Kelly who both tried to hand-deliver the false slates to Pence on the morning of January 6th. Pence’s aide refused the delivery, and both Pence and the Senate parliamentarian refused to count the fake slates.

While all of this was going on, Trump also pressured multiple states’ election officials to change the lawful results of the election. Most notable was the January 2, 2021 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger where Trump asked Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” (44). Trump also repeatedly attacked election workers by name, such as two women in Georgia. His supporters showed up at their homes and sent hundreds of threats. Other people Trump pressured (including Republican legislators in Arizona and Michigan) also had their personal information doxxed and thus received harassing calls and messages.

None of these pressure efforts worked to change the outcome of the election.

Bill Barr, before resigning as Attorney General in mid-December 2020, told Trump there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen and Deputy AG Richard Donoghue met or spoke with Trump almost every day from December 23rd to January 3rd, and Trump repeatedly asked them and the DOJ to find proof of voter fraud. Rosen and Donoghue reiterated to Trump that all of Trump’s claims had already been debunked.

Meanwhile, Representative Scott Perry was working with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to get DOJ official Jeffrey Clark promoted to Attorney General so that Clark could do what Rosen and Donoghue wouldn’t: Overturn the election outcome. Clark even produced a draft letter from the DOJ which he wanted to send to swing states which Biden won. This letter stated that the Department of Justice had found “significant concerns” which could change the outcomes in those states (51). This was a lie, of course, as the DOJ found no significant instances of voter fraud. Clark’s letter also alluded to the two different electoral slates — the real Biden ones and the fake Trump ones — well before they were to be opened on January 6th.

Rosen and Donoghue denounced Clark and the letter. They even showed Clark the reports which indicated there were no instances of widespread voter fraud. Nonetheless, Clark continued to advocate sending the draft letter.

Once Trump realized that Rosen and Donoghue wouldn’t play ball, he offered the job of Attorney General to Clark, who accepted. When Rosen found out about this he called the White House counsel and scheduled a meeting with Trump. (In Rosen’s words: “I wasn’t going to accept being fired by my subordinate, so I wanted to talk to the President directly” [53].) Everyone at that meeting was against the idea of promoting Clark to AG — everyone, that is, except for Clark and Trump. Rosen and Donoghue said that all of the DOJ leadership would resign if Clark became AG. Keep in mind that this was a leadership team full of Trump appointees. Trump realized this plan wouldn’t work, so he rescinded the offer to Clark.

Beginning with the December 18, 2020 “Be there, will be wild!” tweet, Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to rally for him on January 6th (55). His supporters recognized this as a call to action. The Proud Boys, in particular, took the lead in planning an attack on the 6th. They spoke of revolts and revolutions and planned to use violence to prevent the certifying of electoral votes. The Oath Keepers also planned for violence on the 6th. They wanted to create a “quick reaction force” of guns they could keep in Virginia — guns that would be illegal to possess in D.C. The Three Percenters also took up the call to arms. Most importantly, these groups didn’t work in silos. They formed an alliance to work together.

By the start of the new year, government intelligence ascertained there was a good chance things could get violent on January 6th and that Trump supporters were planning on storming the Capitol. The Capitol Police also received this info. There was one site in particular (thedonald.win) that served as a centralized place for planning. Trump’s aides knew about this site, particularly in terms of the power they had over the Trump supporters there. (Senior Advisor to the President Jason Miller texted Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a link to thedonald.win along with the message: “I got the base FIRED UP” [63].) Trump supporters did not hide their plans for violence.

White House staff were also aware of the potential for violence, and some urged Trump to release a statement for things to remain peaceful — which, of course, Trump never did. One factor all of this intelligence didn’t take into account: How Trump would make things worse on the 6th.

The Select Committee interviewed Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato in November 2022, particularly in regard to whether Ornato shared with Meadows and Trump specific concerns from Bobby Engel (head of Trump’s Secret Service detail). Ornato said he didn’t recall, which the Committee found “difficult to believe” (68). Overall, they found “multiple parts of Ornato’s testimony questionable” (68).

On January 6th, as Trump supporters gathered at the Ellipse for his speech, the Secret Service used magnetometers (metal detectors) to confiscate hundreds of knives, hundreds of canisters of pepper spray, and visually spotted AR-15s and other rifles. Some Trump supporters kept watch over large piles of backpacks just outside the magnetometers.

Trump and his team knew enough at this point to call off the speech, or at least cancel plans to go to the Capitol. Instead of doing either of those things, Trump was mad because the metal detectors kept his armed supporters out of the Ellipse, which meant the crowd looked smaller than it was. Even though he knew the crowd was angry and that there was a risk of violence, Trump allowed the rally to happen and instructed his followers to march to the Capitol. Trump’s speech was over an hour long and mostly improvised. He gave the crowd the impression that Pence could (and would!) change the outcome of the election.

After the speech, Trump wanted to go to the Capitol. This was a plan discussed several days before. Although it was meant to look and sound spontaneous, it was not. However, when Engel said it wasn’t safe to do that, Trump became furious. Even back at the White House (after the insurrection was underway) Trump continued to push to go to the Capitol.

More than 2,000 insurrectionists broke into the Capitol and injured more than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers. Once the violence began, everyone near and sympathetic to Trump urged him to call off the mob. It took him over three hours to do so. That’s because all of Trump’s other efforts to overturn the election had failed, and the insurrection at the Capitol appeared to be the one thing working in his favor.

From roughly 1pm to 4pm there are no official photos of Trump, no official records of Trump’s phone calls, and no information in the President’s official Daily Diary. This despite the fact that it was “the worst attack on the seat of the United States Congress in over two centuries” (77). Still, the Select Committee obtained cell phone records that show Trump spoke with Giuliani and a number of U.S. senators during that time.

Meanwhile, everyone at the White House was urging Trump to make a statement to call off the rioters, but he continued to refuse. At 2:15pm the first rioters broke into the Capitol. A flood of texts and tweets came in to get Trump to do something — anything. On a call with Kevin McCarthy, Trump claimed the rioters were Antifa, and McCarthy quickly debunked that: “No, they’re your people” (84).

Ten minutes later, Pence’s Secret Service detail was so worried about dying at the hands of the insurrectionists that they were calling their family members to say goodbye. At this same time (2:24pm), Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” (86). Immediately after that tweet, crowds both inside and outside the Capitol surged forward. Trump knew the rioters were angry at Pence but nonetheless tweeted that message. Trump thought that Pence deserved the persecution.

Trump’s inner circle all thought the 2:24pm tweet was a bad idea, and some resigned immediately. Ivanka and a few others met with Trump to get him to call off the rioters. This led to two more tweets (2:38pm and 3:13pm) where Trump said to stay peaceful and to respect the police. Everyone agreed these tweets didn’t do enough to encourage the insurrectionists to leave. Evidence shows these people were right — unlike the 4:17pm video message, these two tweets didn’t stop the rioters.

Meanwhile, Pelosi, Schumer, McConnell, and Pence were all working to get help since Trump wasn’t doing anything to stop the insurrection. At 4:17pm Trump finally released the video asking the rioters to go home. He also added: “We love you. You’re very important” (92). By this point the National Guard and additional law enforcement had begun to arrive, but the crowd dispersed after Trump’s message. At 6:10pm Trump sent his last tweet of the day. It once again claimed the election was stolen and that the rioters should “go home with love and in peace” (93).

Trump retired to his residence for the night at 6:27pm, but Giuliani continued to try to delay the counting of electoral votes. He called Jim Jordan, Lindsay Graham, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz, among others. Trump didn’t reach out to Pence or any top national security official even a single time after the insurrection began.

In the days after January 6th, all of those close to Trump repeatedly asked him to stop lying about the election, concede, and allow a peaceful transfer of power to Biden. There was also talk from people like McCarthy of invoking the 25th Amendment. McCarthy also mentioned to other House Republicans that Trump acknowledged he was at least partially responsible for the January 6th attack. Yet Trump has continued to claim falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.

Referrals to the U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel and House Ethics Committee

The Select Committee has amassed a lot of information — way more than members of Congress had when they impeached Trump (for a second time) on January 13, 2021. They add: “Today we know that the planning to overturn the election on January 6th was substantially more extensive, and involved many other players, and many other efforts over a longer period of time” (99).

For example, they know Trump and a few others purposely tried to “obstruct, impede, or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th” by pressuring Pence to do something he legally could not do (99). Trump also had other plans to overturn the election, including: creating fake electoral slates, pressuring state officials to “find” votes, and using the DOJ to coerce states to change results. Even though he knew he lost, Trump continued to push The Big Lie to convince people that his actions were justified. And even though he knew Pence couldn’t legally change the election results, Trump continued to put in place steps for that plan’s execution. However, the Committee notes, “even if it were true that President Trump genuinely believed the election was stolen, this is no defense [emphasis theirs]. No President can ignore the courts and purposely violate the law” (101).

The DOJ is also investigating. They’ve prosecuted more than 900 insurrectionists, almost 500 of whom have already been convicted or pleaded guilty. The DOJ is also looking into the individuals who participated in designing these schemes. Importantly, the DOJ has more authority (including the use of search warrants and grand juries) to gain information and testimony from witnesses who ignored the Committee’s subpoenas, such as Mark Meadows, Kevin McCarthy, and Jim Jordan.

Taking all of their facts into account, the Committee makes six criminal referrals to the DOJ:

1. That Trump knowingly tried to “obstruct, influence or impede” an official proceeding — namely, Congress’ joint session to count electoral votes. (John Eastman and certain Republican members of Congress could also be charged under the same law. After January 6th, they all asked Trump for pardons, “revealing their own clear consciousness of guilt” [105].)

2. That several parties — Trump chief among them — conspired to defraud the United States. (Others in this conspiracy include Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows.)

3. That Trump conspired with others to submit slates of false electors, thus conspiring to make a false statement.

4. That Trump incited, assisted, and/or aided and comforted individuals who engaged in an insurrection — i.e. an effort to prevent the peaceful transition of the presidency. (This part notes that the DOJ appears to have obtained a ruling that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone — who didn’t answer certain of the Committee’s questions on the basis of executive privilege — can testify before a grand jury about his communications with President Trump.)

5. That there are two other violations of the United States Code, both of which involve conspiracy. Members of the Oath Keepers have already been convicted of violating these codes, and there is sufficient evidence that Trump also violated these statues.

6. That the DOJ should investigate concerns regarding efforts to obstruct the Committee’s investigation — namely, certain counsel paid by groups tied to Trump who may have advised clients to lie or provide misleading testimony to the Committee.

Although the DOJ has prosecuted hundreds of individuals who participated in the January 6th insurrection, they haven’t yet prosecuted anyone involved in the broader plan to overturn the election. The Committee believes it is critical for these individuals to be held accountable as well. “If President Trump and his associates who assisted him in an effort to overturn the lawful outcome of the 2020 election are not ultimately held accountable under the law,” they write, “their behavior may become a precedent, and invitation to danger, for future elections” (113).

During the course of its investigation, the Committee has also learned that certain members of Congress had relevant information about the 6th. The Committee asked these people to testify voluntarily, but when they didn’t comply then the Committee issued subpoenas to them, namely Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Andy Biggs. McCarthy had multiple communications with Trump, Pence, and others on January 6th. Jordan had meetings with Giuliani and other White House officials to discuss strategies to delay the January 6th joint session. Perry was present for conversations about Trump’s efforts to submit fake electoral slates, and he also pushed for Trump to install Jeffrey Clark as the Acting Attorney General. Biggs encouraged Trump not to concede and worked to get signatures to endorse fake Trump electors in Arizona.

None of these four men have complied with the Committee. McCarthy failed to appear for his scheduled depositions. Jordan failed to appear for his scheduled depositions. Perry failed to appear for his scheduled depositions. Briggs failed to appear for his scheduled depositions. Since all four refused to cooperate, the Committee is referring them to the Ethics Committee for further action. This is because “their willful noncompliance violates multiple standards of conduct and subjects them to discipline” (117). Their behavior undermines Congress’ power to investigate and suggests they are somehow above laws that apply to normal citizens.

Efforts to Avoid Testifying, Evidence of Obstruction, and Assessments of Witness Credibility

More than 30 witnesses pled the Fifth, some instances of which were “particularly troubling,” such as when Michael Flynn was asked whether he believed in the peaceful transition of power in the United States (118). Others avoided testifying altogether, like Mark Meadows (whom the House voted to hold in criminal contempt) and Steve Bannon. Seven members of Congress with unique knowledge of these situations also ignored subpoenas. Many of those, including Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks, Andy Briggs, and Scott Perry, also asked Trump for a pardon, indicating they knew the potential legal trouble they could be in.

The Committee also has evidence suggesting there were efforts to obstruct their investigation. Examples include: a lawyer (paid for with Trump’s PAC money) telling a witness she could simply say she didn’t recall certain facts or events even when she did, or offering her a lucrative job if she provided the kind of testimony the lawyer wanted from her. Trump also contacted witnesses himself.

Many of the witnesses gave straightforward responses. However, this wasn’t true for everyone, particularly certain witnesses from the White House. The Committee cites two examples in particular: Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Ivanka Trump. Parts of McEnany’s testimony seemed evasive, like she was using pre-prepared talking points. And Ivanka wasn’t as forthcoming about her father’s conduct on the 6th as others, such as Ivanka’s Chief of Staff. “In several circumstances, the Committee has found that less senior White House aides had significantly better recollection of events than senior staff purported to have” (126).

The Committee also has concerns about testimony from people who rely on organizations related to Trump for money or employment. “Certain witnesses and lawyers were unnecessarily combative, answered hundreds of questions with variations of ‘I do not recall’ in circumstances where that answer seemed unbelievable, appeared to testify from lawyer-written talking points rather than their own recollections, provided highly questionable rationalizations or otherwise resisted telling the truth” (126).

The Committee calls out Mark Meadows’ 2021 book for spreading intentional lies about January 6th. For example, Meadows claims that Trump never intended to go to the Capitol. Meadows’ Deputy Chief of Staff, Tony Ornato, claimed he didn’t recall Trump being angry after being told he couldn’t march to the Capitol, even though multiple people attested to this fact.

Summary: Creation of the Select Committee; Purposes

In the weeks after January 6th, Kevin McCarthy publicly stated he was in favor of a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection. On February 15, 2021, Speaker Pelosi announced a letter to establish such a commission. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson worked with his Republican counterpart (John Katko) to negotiate the details of the commission. On May 19th, the legislation passed the House — but it didn’t pass the Senate because only six Republican senators supported it.

On June 24th, Pelosi announced her intent to create a House select committee. On June 30th the House passed H. Res 503 to establish a 13-member select committee. Only two Republicans voted in favor: Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

By July 1st, Pelosi had appointed eight members: seven Democrats and Cheney. On July 17th, McCarthy proposed a list of five Republicans for the remaining seats: Jim Jordan, Jim Banks, Kelly Armstrong, Troy Nehls, and Rodney Davis. On July 21st, Pelosi rejected Jordan and Banks since Jordan played an active part in the January 6th insurrection, and Banks had publicly stated that he’d already made up his mind and didn’t intend to cooperate with an investigation. Rather than replace those two members, McCarthy withdrew all five of his nominees. On July 26th, Pelosi appointed Kinzinger. This is why there are only nine members on the Select Committee instead of 13.

Select Committee Witnesses Were Almost Entirely Republican

Finally, the Executive Summary ends with a list of witnesses, the vast majority of whom are Republicans. There is only one Democrat (Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson) and then around 20 “others” — members of the public or police officers.

Election night, 2020: Fox News called Arizona for Biden (a state every Republican presidential candidate had won since 1996), and Trump’s lead began to shrink in other swing states. At 2:21am he addressed the nation. He lied about winning the election and he lied about fraud. His own campaign team told him it could take several days before there was a clear winner and that he shouldn’t declare victory. The only advisor on board with Trump’s plan to lie and declare preemptive victory was a drunk Rudy Giuliani.

However, Trump’s speech that night wasn’t spontaneous. The lies he told were premeditated. Prior to the election, both Steve Bannon and Roger Stone alluded to this tactic of falsely claiming victory. In the days after, Trump’s campaign team told him he had lost and that there was no significant voter fraud. Trump then replaced his campaign team with (in the words of Bill Barr) a “clown car” of people willing to promote conspiracy theories (197).

Trump continued to lie. That’s because the Big Lie was a central part of Trump’s efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th.

1.1 The Big Lie Reflected Deliberate Exploitation of the “Red Mirage”

The basis for the Big Lie was the “Red Mirage” — the idea that Republicans tend to vote in person (and thus their votes show up first), while Democrats will more often vote via mail-in ballots (which take longer to tally). This leads to the illusion that there’s a huge Republican surge of votes, only for the results to change as more mail-in ballots get counted. This is a well-known phenomenon and has happened in nearly every election. Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, reminded Trump of this on election day. But Trump chose to exploit this potential for confusion by lying about fraud and claiming victory. 

1.2 Trump’s Pre-Election Plans to Declare Victory

On October 31, 2020, Bannon spoke to a group of associates from China and laid out Trump’s plan. That same day, Tom Fitton, a conservative activist, drafted a victory speech for Trump. He also wrote that election day was the “deadline by which voters in states across the country must choose a president” and that any ballots counted after election day were part of a partisan plot to overturn the election (199). Roger Stone also alluded to the plan to falsely claim victory: “No, we won. Fuck you. Sorry. Over. We won. You’re wrong. Fuck you” (200).

Reporters had also filed stories prior to election day about Trump’s plan to declare victory and claim the Democrats had stolen the election.

1.3 Trump’s Pre-Election Efforts to Delegitimize the Election Process

Prior to the election, Trump also disparaged mail-in voting. He falsely claimed it would lead to a rigged election. He spouted these lies in interviews, during a presidential debate, and — most often — on Twitter. The Select Committee then provides a handful of examples of such statements, going as far back as April 2020. Stepien told Trump this was a risky strategy since mail-in votes could help Trump tremendously. Trump refused to listen.

Prior to the election, Trump refused to commit to accepting the election results, and he also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. His reason for refusing these commitments? He wasn’t sure the election would be honest.

1.4 President Trump's Launch of the Big Lie

Sure enough, within hours of polls closing, Trump began to claim that vote tallies were illegitimate. However, the “dumps” of votes Trump railed against were accurate tallies of absentee ballots — ballots there were for both Biden and Trump. Again, Trump knew about the “Red Mirage” and lied about it repeatedly, even after being told his claims were false.

1.5 Post-Election: President Trump Replaces His Campaign Team

Immediately after the election, Stepien (the campaign’s manager) and Justin Clark (the campaign’s deputy manager) were willing to investigate standard post-election litigation and other options, like recounts. However, they weren’t willing to promote baseless conspiracy theories. This group of advisors became known as “Team Normal.”

Less than two weeks after the election, Trump had pushed “Team Normal” aside and promoted Giuliani and his associates, who included (among others) Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, and John Eastman.

1.6 President Trump’s Campaign Team Told Him He Lost the Election and There Was No Significant Fraud

Stepien was part of a “truth-telling squad” who tried to counteract Trump and others who were spouting wild allegations of voter fraud (204). Alex Cannon, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, told Mark Meadows there were no instances of fraud sufficient to change the results. Jason Miller, a senior advisor who pushed claims of fraud to the public, privately told Trump several times that there was no widespread voter fraud.

The Trump campaign leadership was all in agreement: Trump had lost, and they told him as much. This was based on their own campaign’s leading data expert, whose analysis of the data did not add up to a victory for Trump.

Then, on November 7th, the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Biden, thus making him the election winner. The narrowest margin of votes was in Arizona, where Biden won by more than 10,000 votes. Recounts challenge differentials in the hundreds (not thousands), so there was no way any state’s results would change. And indeed, Georgia, Arizona, and New Mexico did hand recounts or randomly-selected audits, and the results confirmed the accuracy of the election results.

The data was clear: Biden won, Trump lost. But Trump had no intention of conceding.

On election night, Trump asked Giuliani to take over his campaign’s legal team. By November 6th, this new team was filing lawsuits which challenged changes to voting practices due to the pandemic. On the 7th, Giuliani held a press conference outside the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia where he suggested that Democrats had conspired to steal the election, although he offered no evidence to support this.

On the 10th, Giuliani and others met with Trump. Trump asked Pat Cipollone (White House counsel) if he had spoken with Attorney General Barr. This was an early indication of how Trump planned to pressure the DOJ to endorse his lies about fraud.

On November 14th, Trump announced on Twitter that Giuliani was officially leading his campaign’s legal team. “Team Normal” saw drastic changes to their roles after that. That same day, Giuliani announced that the messaging strategy should be “to go hard on Dominion/Smartmatic” (210). Trump continued to insist he had been cheated out of victory.

1.7 President Trump Had His Day in Court

Judges across the country evaluated Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. Out of 62 cases the Trump team took to court, only one was a win for them, and that was only over a small number of votes. Not a single case vindicated Trump’s claims. Many judges who rejected these wild allegations of fraud were appointed by Republicans — ten of them by Trump himself. One Trump appointee wrote: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here” (212).

Trump and his lawyers knew the courts were rejecting his claims. Powell suggested that all the judges were corrupt, to which White House Senior Advisor Eric Herschmann replied, “Even the ones we appointed?” (213)

1.8 President Trump Repeatedly Promoted Conspiracy Theories

Rather than accept defeat, Trump continued to push conspiracy theories that he knew weren’t true. Using social media, Trump primed his followers to be open to false claims of fraud, then inspired them to produce narratives that backed him up. “The stolen election narrative has proven to be remarkably durable,” the Committee notes, “precisely because it is a matter of belief — not evidence, or reason” (213). Thus, any time a claim got debunked, a handful more would pop up in its place.

The DOJ and FBI looked into these allegations, and none were found to have merit. Numerous DOJ personnel told Trump this repeatedly. The Select Committee mentions that, “During their December 27th conversation with President Trump, Rosen and Donoghue rebutted false claims regarding: suitcases of ballots in Georgia, Dominion’s voting machines in Antrim County, a truckload of ballots in Pennsylvania, ballots being scanned multiple times, people voting more than once, dead people voting, Native Americans being paid to vote, and more votes than voters in particular jurisdictions” (215). Trump’s response? “You guys may not be following the internet the way I do” (215).

It wasn’t only the DOJ correcting Trump; judges, journalists, state authorities, and members of his own legal team corrected him as well. Even so, Trump and Giuliani continued to push these lies as the truth. Meanwhile, state and local officials continually assured voters the election was secure. They held numerous press conferences to respond to claims of fraud.

The Select Committee then analyzes and debunks five common lies Trump told about the election. The first (and longest section) is devoted to the claim that Dominion voting machines switched votes.

An internal campaign memo dated November 12th said that Dominion’s software “did not lead to improper vote counts” (216). The Committee also adds that “the United States Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a joint statement of election security officials on November 12th, reassuring voters that the election was ‘the most secure in American history’” (217).

Instead of accepting this statement, Trump and his supporters harped on a single case of human error in Michigan. They used this example as a pretense that their allegations of fraud were correct. Here’s what happened: Early on the morning of November 4th, a Republican clerk in a majority-Republican county made a mistake tallying votes for the unofficial results. Her error made it look like Biden won Antrim County. When she was told this was an odd result, the clerk looked into it, realized her error, and corrected it.

By the time the official results were ready, the human error had long been fixed. A Republican state senator investigated this issue and found the clerk’s error “entirely attributable to an honest mistake” (218). Again, this was a human error, not one from the voting machines. Yet Trump used it to continue lying about Dominion.

On November 17th, the director of CISA (Christopher Krebs) issued a statement that said any claims of election systems having been manipulated were either “unsubstantiated” or “technically incorrect” (218). Trump fired Krebs that day and claimed that Krebs’ statement was wrong.

On November 19th, Giuliani, Powell, and Ellis held a press conference at the Republican National Convention headquarters. Powell claimed there was international influence from Dominion machines. The next day, on a conference call with Powell, Trump muted himself while Powell spouted claims of foreign interference, laughed, and said, “This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?” (219).

Trump continued to endorse similar outlandish claims, one from a key figure in QAnon. Attorney General Bill Barr repeatedly told Trump he was wrong and being irresponsible. Nonetheless, Trump continued to make these false claims in interviews and video statements.

By early December, courts had rejected all the claims that Dominion machines had been rigged to affect the election results. Throughout December, Trump and his new legal team continued to point to the Antrim County human error as proof of Dominion’s wrongdoing.

On December 13th, an organization called Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) conducted an analysis of Antrim County’s voting machines and systems. ASOG’s leader, Russell Ramsland, released a report a couple days later saying that the inspection found no evidence of vote manipulation. However, the report also had an unsubstantiated claim that Dominion’s machines were “designed with inherent error to create systemic fraud” (221). The next day, Trump tweeted the report along with talking points from Giuliani’s team. Trump also asked Barr and the DOJ to look into it. Barr said he would, although he was skeptical.

In the next few days, experts within and outside the administration thoroughly denounced the ASOG report. Further, “a full hand recount of every ballot cast in Antrim County confirmed the results reported by the Dominion machines” (221). Giuliani’s chief investigator also wasn’t able to find any proof of Dominion machines behaving improperly. Even so, Trump continued to promote the ASOG report.

On December 18th, Trump met with Powell and Michael Flynn, both of whom argued that Trump, thanks to a 2018 executive order, had the authority to seize voting machines. White House lawyers strongly pushed back. Trump also worked with Meadows and Giuliani to see if the Department of Homeland Security had the authority to seize voting machines — they don’t. Giuliani and Powell also tried to gain access to voting machines in multiple states.

On January 2, 2021, Trump had a long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Raffensperger told Trump that they had performed a hand recount of 100% of the ballots and they got “virtually the same result” as the machines (223). On January 4th, Trump gave a speech in Dalton, Georgia where he again claimed wide-spread voter fraud had been committed in Georgia.

Yet Trump and his team have “never provided any evidence showing that Dominion’s voting software altered votes in the 2020 presidential election” (223). Even Giuliani testified that he didn’t think Dominion’s machines stole the election. Powell also failed to provide the Committee with any evidence. Thus, by January 6th, Trump knew his allegations against Dominion were wrong.

The second common lie Trump spread was about the State Farm Arena video from Fulton County, Georgia. On December 3rd, Giuliani presented a video with selectively edited footage from election night. The video allegedly showed a conspiracy to fake a water main break in order to remove Republican poll watchers from the site, then use hidden suitcases full of illegal ballots and scan them multiple times to skew the results in Biden’s favor. None of this was true.

Trump was told a minimum of four times that this theory was wrong. The ballots were in a standard bin, not suitcases, and they weren’t scanned multiple times. Raffensperger said the video was taken out of context. The FBI, DOJ, and Georgia Bureau of Investigations all agreed that nothing nefarious happened. A hand recount confirmed the ballots weren’t scanned multiple times. One worker’s scanner kept jamming, so she scanned certain batches multiple times, but she only hit “accept” once per batch. Yet Trump continued to push “Suitcase Gate” as a lie. He even mentioned this on January 6th during his speech at the Ellipse.

The Committee then notes that Giuliani’s law license was revoked in June 2021 by a New York State appellate court, which cited Giuliani’s statements about the Fulton County ballots as one reason for doing so. “If, as respondent claims, he reviewed the entire video” the appellate court wrote, “he could not have reasonably reached a conclusion that illegal votes were being counted” (226).

The third major lie Trump told repeatedly was about fake ballots that were surreptitiously added to the vote-counting process. The Trump campaign brought nine cases to court regarding so-called “fake ballots,” and all nine were promptly dismissed.

The DOJ and FBI also investigated claims of truckloads of ballots arriving at various polling locations, but these were all debunked. One claim was particularly absurd: Trump said that 100,000 fake ballots were smuggled into a Detroit counting center. There were only a total of 174,384 absentee voter ballots from Detroit, so 100,000 of those being fake “would certainly have been obvious to election officials” (227). It was also easy to verify that there weren’t more votes cast than the number of registered voters.

Russell Ramsland, the doofus behind the ASOG report about Dominion, submitted an affidavit about how turnout in certain Michigan precincts was between 84% and 350%. However, the Committee notes, “Ramsland’s affidavit was widely ridiculed, in part, because he relied on data for dozens of precincts that are located in Minnesota, not Michigan. Even after he corrected his affidavit to remove the Minnesota townships, his Michigan data remained widely off-base” (228).

The fourth major lie went hand-in-hand with the fake ballot lie: that Biden ballots were counted multiple times. These allegations show a deep misunderstanding of how vote counting works, because it’s routine for election officials to rescan ballots if they’re not properly tallied the first time. Again, if hundreds of ballots were being counted multiple times, the number of ballots would be much, much higher than the number of voters who voted, and that was never true.

The fifth common lie Trump told was that dead people (or otherwise ineligible voters) were casting ballots for Biden. Neither of these allegations were true, of course, and any instances where it happened were grossly exaggerated.

By early November, Trump’s legal team discovered that many people the campaign listed as dead were actually alive. On page 230 there’s a fun text exchange between White House Senior Advisor Eric Herschmann and Mark Meadows about the supposed 10,000 dead people who voted in Georgia:

Meadows: My son found 12 obituaries and 6 other possibles depending on the Voter roll acuracy [sic]

Herschmann: That sounds more like it. Maybe he can help Rudy find the other 10k??

Meadows: lol

Even Trump’s own expert of the supposed “dead voters” admitted that they lacked the data to make accurate conclusions. The state officials who did have that data found only a handful of votes cast on behalf of dead people out of the 154.6 million votes cast in the presidential election.

When Lindsay Graham asked Giuliani for evidence of these dead voters, Giuliani’s team admitted that they couldn’t find evidence of dead voters anywhere close to the number Trump claimed. Trump’s legal team was also concerned about a verification document Trump had signed under oath on December 1st asserting that his claims about dead people voting in Georgia were true. A federal judge who reviewed emails about this matter concluded that the emails “are sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States” (231).

1.9 President Trump’s January 6th Speech

At noon on January 6th, Trump gave his speech at the Ellipse. Although the courts found no evidence of fraud and states had certified votes by mid-December, Trump refused to concede. For over an hour Trump strung together baseless conspiracy theory after baseless conspiracy theory. This was a story that he and his associates had made up. In the Ellipse speech alone, Trump made more than 100 lies about a stolen election. These lies riled up the crowd whom he told: “Fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” (233). 

The Big Lie was at the heart of Trump’s plan to stay in power, and he used it to pressure state and local officials to undo the will of the people.

On January 2, 2021, Trump had his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump shared a number of false conspiracy theories which Raffensperger and other officials on the call swiftly debunked. Then Trump made his demand: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” (263). This was the president asking a state’s chief election officer to illegally change the outcome of a lawful election.

Raffensperger understood that Trump’s message was a threat: Do what I ask, or pay the consequences. But Georgia wasn’t the only state Trump and his allies targeted. The January 2nd call was just one element of a larger plan — a plan unknown to the general public.

In parallel with the Big Lie, Trump and his allies focused on key battleground states with Republican state officials. Trump and his team tried to pressure these election officials to overrule voters, disregard vote counts, or deliver electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden. Had enough of these state officials caved, Trump’s plan might have worked.

2.1 The Electoral College, and President Trump’s Attempt to Subvert It

First, a quick rundown of how the electoral college works. What’s important is that this process comes from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says that each state shall appoint electoral college electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct” (265). All 50 states have decided that electoral college electors will be selected by popular vote — meaning, the candidate who wins each state’s popular vote will get their electoral college electors’ votes from that state.

The law gives states the right to determine how electoral college electors are chosen before the election, but not after. However, Trump and his team pushed state legislators to change the rules after the election, even if it meant disenfranchising millions of Americans.

2.2 The Plan Emerges

A September 23, 2020 article from The Atlantic reported on the Trump campaign’s plan to ask state legislators to disregard the popular vote and choose their own slate of electors. In the days after the election, Trump and those around him pushed hard to do exactly that.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows texted with Don Jr., Andy Biggs, Rick Perry, and others about this plan, focusing on Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other swing states with Republican-led legislatures. Vince Haley, the Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy, Strategy and Speechwriting, also explored this idea less than a week after the election. Haley saw election fraud as a way to justify this plan, but that was only one rationale. He believed that state legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their best judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if doing so prevents “socialism” (268). Haley also put together a list of six “weak kneed legislators” that Trump should call and coerce (268). Trump ended up calling several people on this list.

Other people in on this plan: former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, and conservative activist Cleta Mitchell, who emailed John Eastman on November 5th to ask him to write a memo justifying the plan. Eastman titled his memo “The Constitutional Authority of State Legislatures to Choose Electors.” By mid-November, Trump was very interested in this state-focused path toward victory.

2.3 Outreach and Implementation of the Plan

Between the November election and January 6th, the Select Committee knows of at least 200 public or private attempts Trump and his associates made to target state legislators (or other local election administrators) to try to get them to overturn their states’ results. This is surely an undercount.

The 200 attempts include: 68 meetings, calls, or texts; 18 prominent public remarks targeting one or more official; and 125 social media posts by Trump or senior aides. Again, these were attempts to coerce GOP-led legislatures in states Trump lost, namely Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. What follows is a breakdown of these various efforts and the states they focused on.

First, Trump’s early pressure on public servants.

Trump figured Republican officials would go along with his plan since they were on the “same team” (272). Multiple Michigan state officials were indeed on board and met with Trump at the White House. In Arizona, Trump spoke with Kelli Ward, the Chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, to have her ask the Chairman of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors to “stop the counting” (272). In Georgia, Trump publicly criticized Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Raffensberger. In Pennsylvania, Trump called out Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt (a Republican) after Schmidt debunked Giuliani’s false claims from the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. Trump’s followers then deluged Schmidt with threatening and harassing calls and emails in the hopes that Schmidt would cave to Trump’s demand. “After the President tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did,” Schmidt testified, “the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home. Just every bit of detail that you could imagine” (274).

Next, Trump tried to prevent state and local officials from certifying the election.

On November 17th, the Wayne County Board of Canvassers met to certify results. Wayne County includes Detroit and its surrounding areas. The two Republican members (Board Chair Monica Palmer and Board Member William Hartmann) voted to block the certification, even though Michigan state law makes it clear that this meeting was purely clerical. After a short break, Palmer and Hartmann changed their votes and certified the results. 20 minutes later, they received a call from Trump. The Select Committee doesn’t know what Trump said on this call, but the next day Palmer and Hartmann issued signed affidavits to rescind their votes. Trump also knew this was going to happen — he tweeted about the affidavits eight hours before they were publicly released.

In Arizona, Kelli Ward contacted two Republican members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to ask them to delay certification. The Supervisors said Arizona law required certification that day, and, not seeing any evidence of fraud, the Board unanimously voted to certify the results. Ten days later, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey (a Republican) certified Arizona’s statewide results. Trump then targeted Ducey multiple times on Twitter.

Once counties and states certified their results, Trump turned to pressuring state legislators into choosing electoral college electors who would vote for Trump. Thankfully, no state legislators went along with this plan, although Trump and his team hastily arranged a series of “hearings” with state legislators on this topic.

In Pennsylvania, state senator Doug Mastriano requested a hearing about the election. An official hearing would require sworn testimony and be open to both parties, so a November 25th “hearing” was done unofficially. Trump phoned in to this meeting of state legislators to ask them to turn the election around, and Giuliani and Jenna Ellis told the legislators how they could do so. Trump then invited some of the lawmakers to the White House to discuss further, and around 30 people went to Washington, D.C. that evening.

On November 30th, Trump phoned in to another “hearing” led by Giuliani and Ellis, this time in Arizona. Again, they pitched the idea that the legislators had a duty to step in and not certify “false” results. Trump also once again criticized Governor Ducey.

Michigan was next. Although a Republican-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee found no evidence of widespread fraud, the Michigan House Oversight Committee invited Giuliani to testify on December 2nd. Giuliani wasn’t placed under oath, so he was able to share baseless conspiracy theories. He and Ellis urged legislators to “take it back” — “it” being the election results (279). (A quick side note: One witness at this hearing criticized Michigan’s voter identification process by saying: “I think Chinese all look alike. So how can you tell? If some Chow shows up, you can be anybody and you can vote” [279].)

And in Georgia, Giuliani appeared in multiple “hearings,” the first of which was on December 3rd. At one “hearing,” he claimed that Kemp and Raffensperger were engaged in a cover-up. Giuliani used all of his appearances to implore Republican legislators to appoint new electoral college electors. Giuliani repeatedly referred to the State Farm Arena video as a “smoking gun” (280). He also publicly named two election workers in the video and accused them of criminal misconduct. His comments turned their lives upside down because they then became the target of harassment from Trump supporters. (More on this later.)

While these “hearings” were taking place, the Trump campaign contacted hundreds of state legislators to ask them to appoint electoral college electors for Trump. 190 of these legislators were from Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan alone. When one White House staffer’s voicemail to a legislator was leaked to the press, her supervisor wasn’t mad — he was proud. “They [the press] unwittingly just got your message out there,” he texted. “You used the awesome power of the presidency to scare a state rep into getting a statewide newspaper to deliver your talking points” (281).

Some state officials received more personalized calls from Trump and Giuliani.

In Michigan, as mentioned earlier, state legislators were on board and met with Trump at the White House. Trump never made a specific ask at that meeting, but everyone there knew what he wanted them to do. However, Michigan’s Senate Majority Leader wasn’t keen on that plan, so he and the Michigan Speaker of the House issued a joint statement after the meeting to say they would lawfully follow the process for selecting electors. In the weeks after, Trump hounded the two with calls. On January 3rd, he tweeted their personal phone numbers and asked his followers to contact the two men to decertify the results. Michigan’s Senate Majority Leader received almost 4,000 texts, while the other number (which was wrong and belonged to a private citizen) got inundated with calls and texts intended for the Michigan House Speaker.

As for Pennsylvania, Mark Meadows texted Representative Scott Perry to get the numbers of the Pennsylvania Senate Leader and the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House. Perry obliged. Giuliani called the Senate Leader on Thanksgiving and asked him to bring the Pennsylvania legislature into a special session. The Senate Leader said he and his lawyers agreed that he didn’t have the authority to do that, to which Giluiani said the senator must have bad lawyers. A couple days later, Trump called the Senate Leader and also disparaged the senator’s lawyers.

As for the Pennsylvania Speaker of the House, Giuliani and Ellis left a series of voicemails for him. They asked to “get together, quietly” to talk about election fraud since the Speaker was a “fellow Republican” (285). Trump also called the Speaker and invited him to the White House in early December. The same day the Speaker went to the White House, the Senate Leader and other Michigan legislators released a joint statement asserting that they lacked the authority to appoint their own slate of electors. Trump then called them all out by name on Twitter and used the hashtag “Traitors” (286).

In Arizona in late November, Trump and Giuliani called Arizona House Speaker “Rusty” Bowers to ask him to hold a public hearing to replace Biden electors with Trump electors. Bowers told them he would not break his oath to the Constitution, to which Giuliani said, “I would think you would listen a little more open to my suggestions, that we’re all Republicans” (287).

On December 1st, Giuliani and Ellis scheduled a meeting with Bowers and many other powerful Republican lawmakers in Arizona to ask them to disregard the popular vote and deliver Arizona’s electors for Trump. Giuliani and Ellis brought up numerous allegations of fraud, although they never backed those claims up with proof.

Trump called Bowers again in late December. On January 4th John Eastman called Bowers to urge him to “just do it and let the court sort it out” (288).

Although Trump and Giuliani focused mainly on state officials in Arizona, they also reached out to several Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. The Select Committee then shares some of Giuliani’s voicemail messages to these members, which are similar to others we’ve read about before and just as brazen.

As for Georgia: Trump was in Georgia on December 5th for a rally to mobilize voters for the January Senate runoff. That morning he called Governor Kemp to ask the governor to reconvene the legislature for a special session. The next day, Kemp released a statement that made it clear legislatures can’t choose presidential electors. That made Trump angry. “Even without his many retweets,” the Committee notes, “President Trump posted an average of about one tweet per day in December 2020 either criticizing Governor Kemp or pressuring him explicitly or implicitly to take actions to help overturn the election” (290).

2.4 An Outright Request for Victory

Trump and his allies also asked outright for enough votes to win the election. Mark Meadows visited election officials in Georgia, as well as worked with members of Congress to “find” votes. On one of these visits to Georgia, Meadows connected the Secretary of State’s chief investigator with Trump. Meadows also asked Georgia’s Deputy Secretary of State if there was a way to speed up certification in Fulton County for Trump, particularly “if the trump [sic] campaign assisted financially” (291). Lastly, Meadows worked to set up the January 2nd call between Trump and Raffensperger.

By January 2nd, Trump had tried to speak with Raffensperger at least 18 times. Raffensperger had avoided the calls because of ongoing litigation. When they finally connected, Trump asked Raffensperger to find him the votes he needed to win Georgia. When Trump realized Raffensperger wouldn’t play ball, he applied pressure by accusing the Georgia election officials of committing crimes by certifying “illegal” ballots (293). The next day, Trump tweeted that Raffensperger couldn’t answer Trump’s questions about fraud, but that was a lie. Raffensperger and his team repeatedly debunked Trump’s allegations on the call.

2.5 Some Officials Eagerly Assisted President Trump with His Plans

Although many state officials rejected Trump’s demands, some eagerly embraced them. For example, Trump routinely coordinated with Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. The Committee provides lots of instances of contact and scheming, particularly as January 6th approached.

One email Mastriano sent to Trump’s team was a pair of letters from state senators asking Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on January 6th. The Select Committee subpoenaed Mastriano to testify about his interactions with Trump, but “unlike numerous other witnesses who complied with subpoenas and provided deposition testimony to the Select Committee, Mastriano did not; he logged in to a virtual deposition at the appointed time but logged out before answering any substantive questions or even taking the oath to tell the truth” (295).

2.6 The Final Outreach to State Legislators

The two weeks before January 6th saw Trump and his campaign team follow a “Strategic Communications Plan” when engaging with or demonizing state officials. Of course, parts of this plan were in place several weeks earlier, but the joint session on January 6th was the catalyst to formalize a plan. The document (which was put together by Giuliani and his team) focuses on swing state Republicans at all levels of government. The goal was a “nationwide communications outreach campaign to educate the public on the fraud numbers, and inspire citizens to call upon legislators and Members of Congress to disregard the fraudulent vote count and certify the duly-elected President Trump” (297). They planned to do this through rallies and protests, some of which would occur at “weak Members’ homes” (297). The state legislators (or “TARGETS” as they’re called in the document) are a long list of people, many of whom I’ve mentioned earlier in this chapter (297).

On December 31st, Giuliani went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to whip up the base and have them contact their state legislators to let them know what they thought. Another part of the plan was to call out Republicans who wouldn’t go along with what Trump wanted. Some of Trump’s supporters then menacingly showed up to officials’ homes.

January 2nd was a busy day: Trump had his call with Raffensperger, as well as a call with Lindsay Graham and Freedom Caucus members to plan for the joint session on January 6th. That same day Trump also joined a virtual meeting for 300 Republican legislators from swing states. The event was hosted by a short-lived organization called Got Freedom? that listed Ellis as a leadership member. When Trump joined the meeting, he told the legislators that they had the power to shape the outcome of the election. Giuliani then rallied them to action by asking them to put “excessive pressure” on their leadership (299).

After the meeting, they sent a follow-up email to reiterate that the legislators should decertify “tainted” results and demand that laws be followed exactly as they’re written (299). They also asked the legislators to sign a joint letter to Pence asking him to delay the certification of electoral votes. The letter received more than 100 signatures by legislators from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

2.7 The Harm Caused by Demonizing Public Servants

Many of the people who refused to overturn the election results faced public and private intimidation. Trump never discouraged or condemned this behavior — in fact, he often encouraged it through tweets and speeches. Trump could go from praising someone one day to asking his followers to threaten that person with a primary challenge just a few days later.

In addition to mentions on Twitter or in speeches, Trump approved a series of TV and social media ads that ran in several important states. Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s Senior Advisor, said the point of these ads was to fire up the GOP base to put pressure on state legislators by having the ads instruct listeners to call their leaders and demand action. Trump also used interviews to lash out at certain officials. For instance, on November 30th, Trump claimed that Raffensperger was in on the fraud happening in Georgia.

What follows in the report is three pages of state officials who were demonized by Trump. The Select Committee notes that “this list is by no means exhaustive” (303).

In Arizona, several officials received violent threats that led to them evacuating their homes, packing go-bags, or changing their phone numbers. A couple specific threats: “Let’s burn her house down and kill her family and teach these fraudsters a lesson” (303). Members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors “have earned a good old fashioned neck tie party” as “punishment for Treason” (303).

Things were similar for officials in Michigan: Trump supporters showed up to officials’ homes to threaten them or their families. One official received “a torrent of threats and harassment,” such as one anonymous caller who “repeatedly threatened to kill her and her family” (304).

Officials received multiple death threats in Pennsylvania. This happened as recently as a year after the 2020 election. “I feel anxiety every time I walk outside the house,” one official said.

This was true in Georgia as well. Election offices in ten Georgia counties received bomb threats, and on January 5, 2021, someone posted a Craigslist ad to encourage people to “put an end to the lives of these traitors” — “these traitors” being Kemp and Raffensberger (305).

Then, of course, there are the two Black election workers from the State Farm Arena video whom Trump targeted by name. One of the women received hundreds of threats at her home. Her son received threatening phone calls, too, one of which said he “should hang alongside your nigger momma” (306). After a December 5th Trump rally, Trump supporters went to go bang on her front door. She fled from her own home and didn’t return for months.

The sense of dread these two women felt was completely justified: A member of the Oath Keepers who was convicted of multiple offenses regarding January 6th had a “DEATH LIST” at his home (307). There were only two names on the list: Those two women.

During his speech at the Ellipse on January 6th, Trump asked his followers to “demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated” (341). This was the culmination of a plan many weeks in the making that Trump oversaw himself.

On December 14th, the day the real electoral college electors met to cast their votes, fake electoral college electors met in seven battleground states Trump lost (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) to cast electoral votes for Trump. There was no legitimate reason for these fake electors to meet. This was done in an effort to force Pence, as President of the Senate, to disregard real electoral college votes for Biden in favor of the fake ones for Trump.

But there were no real, competing slates of electors. By December 14th, all seven of these states had certified their official results for Biden. Likewise, no courts or state legislatures had refused election results. “Given all this,” the Select Committee notes, “these groups of Trump backers who called themselves Presidential electors were never actually electors, and the votes they purported to cast on December 14th were not valid. They were fake. They had no legal standing, and their fake votes could not have been used by Vice President Pence to disregard the real votes of electors chosen by the voters” (342).

Regardless, Trump continued to claim there were competing slates of electors. Trump’s plan was illegal. A June 7, 2022 opinion by a Federal District judge made that clear. It was also an “unprecedented and destructive break from the electoral college process” and led to the violence that occurred on January 6th (342).

3.1 Laying the Groundwork for the Fake Elector Plan: The Chesebro Memos

The fake elector plan was the brainchild of Kenneth Chesebro, an outside legal advisor to the Trump campaign. He wrote a series of memos which laid the foundation for this plan.

Chesebro’s first memo was on November 18th. He suggested that Wisconsin’s slate of Republican nominees to the electoral college should meet on December 14th to cast placeholder electoral college votes. This would achieve two aims: First, to buy a few extra weeks to challenge Wisconsin’s results in court, and secondly to have those Trump slates ready to go should a court/state legislature make a decision in Trump’s favor after December 14th.

On December 9th, Chesebro wrote a second memo suggesting that Congress itself could choose which slates to accept. However, Article II of the Constitution makes it clear that only the states have the power to appoint electors — not Congress. In no way can Congress pick and choose which electors it wants. Still, Chesebro noted, “the purpose of having the electoral college votes sent in to Congress is to provide the opportunity to debate the election irregularities in Congress, and to keep alive the possibility that the votes could be flipped to Trump” (344). These electors “would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted” (344).

The December 9th memo also acknowledged that states have very specific requirements that need to be met in order for electors to legally cast their votes (such as doing so in the presence of the secretary of state, or within a state capitol building) and that the fake electors would have a difficult time meeting some of those requirements.

On December 13th, Chesebro emailed Giuliani with the subject line: “Brief notes on ‘President of the Senate’ strategy.” Here Chesebro outlined the plan to have Pence, as the President of the Senate, make his own judgment about which slates to count when presented with conflicting votes. However, as the Select Committee points out, “there were never two slates of electoral votes, so this premise itself was fundamentally wrong. But he was arguing that even if votes by fake electors were never retroactively ratified under State law, their mere submission to Congress would be enough to allow the presiding officer to disregard valid votes for former Vice President Biden” (345).

This plan was doomed from the beginning, but that didn’t stop Trump from trying it anyway. As January 6th approached, John Eastman worked with Chesebro to write two more memos to extend this plan.

3.2 President Trump and the Campaign Adopt the Fake Elector Scheme

By early December, Mark Meadows and Jason Miller worked to get the 79 GOP electoral college nominees from those battleground states to all meet on December 14th to cast their fake votes. Meadows was very hands-on with this plan. Trump was also very involved.

Before December 14th, Trump called Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel to ask for help coordinating the fake electors. She agreed to help. Trump also worked with Giuliani to implement the plan.

3.3 The Campaign Legal Team Bows Out, and Giuliani Steps In

Not everyone on the campaign was on board with this plan. Several of the senior legal staffers expressed doubt, hesitation, or refusal. One staffer wasn’t comfortable with the fact that these fake electors weren’t properly nominated even though they were made to appear as such.

It wasn’t only the campaign lawyers expressing doubt — the White House counsel objected, too. But as the campaign’s core legal team backed away from the plan, Giuliani and Chesebro stepped in.

Chesebro wrote and distributed documents for the fake elector ceremonies in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “He also gave some of the groups step-by-step logistical guidance, such as when and where they should convene, how many copies each person would need to sign, and to send their fake votes to Congress via registered mail. ‘Pretty Simple!’ he commented in some of these emails” (350).

The Trump campaign’s Director of Election Day Operations, Michael Roman, also played a large part in reaching out to fake electors to ensure enough of them would show up on December 14th, even putting together a list of substitute electors if some of the electors didn’t show up. The RNC and state Republicans also helped to mobilize fake electors in all seven states.

3.4 Some of the Proposed Fake Electors Express Concerns about the Plan

Some of the Republican electors recruited for this plan expressed concerns. For example, after speaking with Giuliani, one Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman said, “These guys are up to no good and its [sic] gonna fail miserably” (352). Even so, this Chairman still participated in the plan.

In the end, only 14 of the 79 original Republican electoral college nominees backed out.

3.5 On December 14th, the Fake Electors Meet and Vote

On December 14th, the fake electors met in all seven states and used Chesebro’s instructions to submit their electoral slates. Five out of the seven states used language that falsely declared their signed certificate was from “the duly elected and qualified Electors” even though none of the signers had been given that status by their state governments (353). The other two states had language that made these fake electors “the duly elected and qualified Electors” in the case of a court order recognizing them as such (353). All seven sets of fake electoral votes were then sent to Washington, D.C. That evening, RNC Chairwoman McDaniel sent an email to Trump to update him that everything had gone well.

The Trump team also encouraged subterfuge to carry out this plan. In Georgia, for instance, the fake electors were told to go to the state capitol building and “state to the guards that you are attending a meeting with either Senator Brandon Beach or Senator Burt Jones” (354). In Michigan, the fake electors were told by someone on the Trump campaign to “meet in the capitol and hide overnight so that they [can] fulfill the role of casting their vote in, per law, in [sic] the Michigan chambers” (354).

3.6 The Fallout from the Fake Elector Plan

Despite all their effort, the plan failed. On January 3rd, the U.S. Senate Parliamentarian rejected the fake slates from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania because they lacked the official state seal, or weren’t approved by a governor. The fake slates from Michigan and Wisconsin didn’t even show up in time for the Parliamentarian to reject.

Again, there was no way Pence could have used these fake electoral slates on January 6th because those slates had no legal relevance.

But from December 14th to January 6th, Trump and his team pushed the idea that the fake slates had a purpose. Eastman wrote: “the fact that we have multiple slates of electors demonstrates the uncertainty of either. That should be enough” (355).

We’ll hear more about Eastman’s memos in Chapter 5, but by January 2021 he and Chesebro were working together very closely on this plan. The gist of Eastman’s memos was to stress the two competing slates of electoral votes and that Pence had the power to act as “the ultimate arbiter” (356).

Since the Michigan and Wisconsin fake electoral votes never made it to D.C., a Trump campaign deputy hand-delivered them to Congress. Representative Mike Kelly’s office then tried to deliver them to one of Pence’s aides, but the aide ignored the text. Senator Ron Johnson was also involved in trying to schedule a delivery. The aide’s response: “Do not give that to him [the Vice President]” (357). Even if these fake electoral votes made it to Pence (which they didn’t), they still would have been invalid.

As January 6th approached, Senator Mike Lee, who had spent months encouraging this idea, began to reconsider. He texted Trump advisor Cleta Mitchell: “Will you please explain to me how this doesn’t create a slippery slope problem for all future presidential elections?” (359). Exactly, Mike. Exactly.

4.1 The DOJ Found No Significant Evidence of Fraud

As discussed in Chapter 1, Trump used the “Red Mirage” phenomenon to claim there was major voter fraud in the election, even though this wasn’t the case. Attorney General Bill Barr did his job and investigated claims of fraud even in the absence of evidence. The DOJ normally waits to investigate until after results are certified since they realize the power an investigation could have in terms of influencing the outcome of an election. So Barr waited two days until after the media declared Biden the winner before he authorized the DOJ to investigate.

4.2 November 23, 2020: Barr Challenges President Trump’s Election Lies

Barr met with Trump three times after the election, the first being on November 23rd. Giuliani wanted to blame the DOJ for not finding evidence of fraud. Barr explained that the DOJ had been investigating for two weeks, but they hadn’t found anything. Barr also pushed back against Trump’s “disturbing” allegations about Dominion voting machines, which, in Barr’s opinion, were “complete nonsense” (375-376).

Trump began meeting with state legislators after the November 23rd meeting, and Barr worried Trump was digging into these fraud lies rather than letting them go.

4.3 December 1, 2020: President Trump Is Irate After Barr Says There Is No Significant Fraud

On November 29th, Trump gave his first TV interview since he had lost the election. It was with Fox News. He continued to lie about fraud and Dominion machines. When asked if the DOJ was looking into these claims, Trump said the DOJ was “missing in action,” which was also a lie (377). This made Barr want to speak out.

On December 1st, Barr met with a reporter from the Associated Press to clear up that the DOJ hadn’t found any fraud on the scale to change the results of the election. That evening, Barr met with Trump at the White House, and Trump was seething mad. Trump barraged Barr with “idiotic claims” of fraud (378). “I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bullshit, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bullshit” (378). But nothing Barr said satisfied Trump. Barr offered to resign, to which Trump pounded the table in front of him and said, “Accepted” (378). However, in the parking lot after the meeting, White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschmann convinced Barr to stay.

On December 3rd, Giuliani met with the Georgia Senate Government Oversight Committee. He shared footage from the State Farm Arena video. The next day, Barr asked the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia to look into the video. That person did so and told Barr there was no substance to Giuliani’s allegations.

4.4 December 14, 2020: Barr Submits His Resignation

Barr became more and more fed up with Trump’s actions and lies, so on December 14th he met with Trump to resign. Trump asked who would be the new Attorney General, and Barr suggested Jeffrey Rosen become the Acting Attorney General and Richard Donoghue become the Acting Deputy Attorney General. Trump followed Barr’s advice.

4.5 Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue Hold the Line

Trump immediately began to pressure Rosen and Donoghue. The same day Barr resigned, Trump’s assistant emailed Rosen a set of talking points about fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. The next day, Trump held a meeting at the White House with Rosen, Donoghue, and others. The main focus of the meeting was the Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) report on Dominion machines in Antrim County. Trump claimed it was proof that the machines were defective. He asked why the DOJ wasn’t doing more to look into it.

Of course, the DOJ had already looked into it. It’s just that they hadn’t found any of Trump’s claims to be true.

4.6 President Trump Is Introduced to Jeffrey Clark

On December 21st, 11 House Republicans met with Trump at the White House to discuss the plan to object to the certification of electoral college votes on January 6th. One of the Representatives there was Scott Perry from Pennsylvania.The next day, Perry introduced “a little-known DOJ official” named Jeffrey Clark to Trump (382). Clark was the Acting Head of the Civil Division and Head of the Environmental and Natural Resources Division at the DOJ. As the Select Committee notes, “Clark had no experience in, or responsibilities related to, investigating allegations of election fraud” (383).

Trump called Rosen every day from December 23rd to January 3rd to express his dissatisfaction with the DOJ. On December 24th, Trump brought up Clark’s name, which Rosen found odd — how did Trump even know who Jeffrey Clark was? So Rosen met with Clark on December 26th. Clark said he had met with Trump in the Oval Office several days before and had told Trump that if Trump changed up the leadership at the DOJ then the Department might be able to do more to support Trump’s claims. Clark was “defensive” and “apologetic” and said that it wouldn’t happen again (383). Clark said that if anyone else asked him to go to a meeting like that, he’d notify Rosen and Donoghue.

Clark’s December 22nd meeting with Trump “was a clear violation of Department policy, which limits interactions between the White House and the Department’s staff” (384). This is because it is of the utmost importance that the DOJ remain free from political interference. Nonetheless, Representative Perry continued to advocate on Clark’s behalf, particularly to Mark Meadows.

4.7 December 27th Phone Call

On December 27th, Trump called Rosen. It was a lengthy call, and Rosen asked that Donoghue be conferenced in. Trump once again said the DOJ wasn’t doing their job, then threw out a slew of false allegations. He also brought up the ASOG report from Antrim County. (As a reminder, “the net difference between the machine count and the hand count was only 12 out of 15,718 total votes. The machines counted just one vote more for former Vice President Biden than was tallied during the hand recount” [385].) Rosen and Donoghue debunked each of Trump’s claims of election fraud, many of which Barr had already debunked for Trump.

At one point in the conversation, Rosen wanted Trump to understand that the DOJ can’t just “snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election” (386). Trump responded: “I don’t expect you to do that. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen” (386).

Trump wanted the DOJ to tell the American people that the election was illegal or corrupt. Rosen and Donoghue refused. They said that states run their elections and that the DOJ isn’t “quality control for the states” (387). Trump then threatened to make Jeffrey Clark the Acting Attorney General. Donoghue replied: “Sir, that’s fine, you should have the leadership you want, but understand, changing the leadership in the Department won’t change anything” (387).

4.8 Congressman Scott Perry Calls Donoghue

Later on the 27th, Perry called Donoghue to push Trump’s lies. Perry was a key congressional ally in Trump’s plan to overturn the election. A week after Barr told the press there was no evidence of significant fraud, Perry and 26 other Republican Congressmen signed a letter asking Trump to have the AG appoint a special counsel to investigate voting irregularities. Perry was also one of the 11 congressional Republicans who met with Trump on December 21st to discuss objecting to electoral votes on January 6th.

On the call with Donoghue, Perry said he didn’t think the DOJ was doing its job and that Jeffrey Clark “would do something about this” (389). That evening, Perry emailed Donoghue some documents alleging fraud in Pennsylvania. Donoghue had someone look into it, and sure enough, there was nothing to it.

4.9 December 28, 2020: The Clark Letter

On December 28th, Clark sent Rosen and Donoghue a five-page draft letter addressed to Governor Kemp and two other Georgia election officials. There were places for Rosen and Donoghue to sign their names, which they refused to do.

In the letter (which Clark also wanted to send to state officials in other key states Trump lost), Clark wrote: “The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States. The Department will update you as we are able on investigatory progress, but at this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia” (390). Clark went on to write that the DOJ recommended the Georgia General Assembly to hold a special session to investigate these issues and deliberate. Clark also mentioned the competing slates of electors.

This whole letter was a lie. Barr, Rosen, and Donoghue had repeatedly found no evidence of fraud that would have impacted the election results. But by late December, all of Trump’s other attempts to overturn the election had failed, so he turned to using the power and sway of the DOJ to pressure state legislators to do what Trump wanted. In fact, there were several similarities between Clark’s letter and what Trump and Giuliani were asking of state legislators. It’s unclear how directly Clark worked with Trump’s team, as Clark asserted his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions.

One person who for-sure worked with Clark and John Eastman was Ken Klukowski, a Trump administration political appointee who worked under Clark at the DOJ. (There’s a very funny endnote detail here: Klukowski’s appointment was expedited because the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office “wanted him in soon” [392]. When the Committee asked Klukowski why he accepted a job that started on December 15th and would end on January 20th, Klukowski said he would be able to put on his resume that he worked at the DOJ from 2020 to 2021, which would help him get job interviews in the future before anyone found out how few days he actually worked there.)

On December 28th, Clark dictated the Georgia letter to Klukowski. After several more meetings that day, Klukowski gave the letter to Clark, who then shared it with Rosen and Donoghue. Donoghue got back right away saying there was no chance he’d sign the letter. He stressed that the DOJ had found no sign of voter fraud on the scale that would influence the election result.

4.10 December 29th Meeting

The next day, Rosen and Donoghue had a meeting in Mark Meadows’ office with some White House lawyers. The meeting was primarily to discuss the presidential transition. During the meeting, Meadows brought up a new allegation of international influence in the election. (After the meeting, Donoghue passed it along to the FBI who quickly determined the allegation was not credible.)

They also discussed Texas vs. Pennsylvania. This was a case that went to the Supreme Court shortly after the election. Texas alleged that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all violated the Constitution by changing election rules due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (The Supreme Court dismissed the case due to a fundamental misunderstanding of Article III of the Constitution.) Trump now wanted the DOJ to file a lawsuit as well, in what would essentially amount to United States vs. Pennsylvania. Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel looked into this in the days after the meeting and determined it would be a “meritless lawsuit” (394).

4.11 Rosen’s December 30th Call with President Trump

Nonetheless, Trump continued to push the DOJ to file the lawsuit. Trump called Rosen on December 30th to discuss it once again. Rosen reiterated that the DOJ would not file the lawsuit.

4.12 December 31st Meeting

Trump returned to Washington, D.C. on the 31st after spending Christmas in Florida. That afternoon he summoned Rosen and Donoghue to the Oval Office. Trump was adamant that the election had been stolen from him. He once again floated the idea of naming Jeffrey Clark the Acting Attorney General. He once again brought up Antrim County, which had completed their hand recount on December 17th. He once again suggested that Rosen and Donoghue name a special counsel.

Rosen and Donoghue debunked all of these wild claims and accusations. At one point Trump also brought up the idea of seizing voting machines. Rosen said the DOJ would need a search warrant, but there wasn’t any evidence to justify one.

Rosen spoke with Clark on the phone either later that day or on January 1st. Clark mentioned he had spoken to Trump again (even though Clark had promised Rosen and Donoghue that he’d let them know of any further contact from the White House) and that Trump had offered him the Acting Attorney General position. Clark had until Monday, January 4th, to decide, but Clark wanted to do his due diligence by looking into the claims of fraud before accepting the offer.

4.13 January 2, 2021: Rosen and Donoghue Confront Clark Again

On January 2nd, Rosen and Donoghue once again met with Clark to try to convince him to stand down. Donoghue reiterated that he was Clark’s boss and that what Clark was doing was a violation of DOJ policy. Clark still wanted to send the letter to Georgia and other contested states, so he said that if Rosen and Donoghue signed that letter then he would turn down Trump’s offer. Rosen and Donoghue made it clear they would never sign that letter.

This was the same day that Trump had his call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffenspeger that was discussed in Chapter 2.

4.14 January 3, 2021: Clark Informs DOJ Leadership That He Will Accept President Trump’s Offer

On January 3rd, Clark told Rosen he had accepted the job. Clark then said that Rosen — who was, for the time being, still Clark’s boss — could become Clark’s deputy. Rosen found this to be “preposterous” and “nonsensical” (398).

Trump spoke with Clark four times that day, according to the White House call logs. The last call shows that Trump spoke with “Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Clark,” indicating Clark had accepted Trump’s offer (398).

However, Rosen didn’t feel comfortable with the DOJ “doing things that were not consistent with the truth” (398). So he did four things. First, he called up Mark Meadows to arrange a meeting that evening with Trump. Next, he called up Pat Cipollone. Cipollone suggested they should “fight this out at the White House” (398). Third, he asked Engel to join him and Donoghue at the White House that evening. And finally, he asked a senior DOJ attorney to schedule a meeting with the rest of the available DOJ leadership so that Rosen could fill them all in and see how they’d react to Clark’s appointment. Everyone who attended that call agreed to resign if Rosen were removed from office.

The meeting at the White House began at 6:15pm. In attendance were Rosen, Donoghue, Engel, and Clark, as well as White House lawyers Pat Cipollone, Eric Hershmann, and Pat Philbin.

Clark said that, as Acting Attorney General, he would conduct “real investigations” in whatever manner Trump deemed appropriate (400). Everyone else present disagreed. Trump then asked Donoghue and Engel what they would do if Clark became Acting AG, and they both said they would resign. Donoghue then told Trump that every Assistant Attorney General would also resign. The DOJ leadership team was all Trump appointees, so Donoghue asked Trump: “What happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions? What does that say about your leadership?” (400-401). Cipollone also threatened to resign. He called Clark’s letter a “murder-suicide pact” (401).

Clark tried to defend his credentials since he had worked on both civil and environmental litigation. Donoghue replied: “That’s right. You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill?” (401). (I also want to take a moment to say how sad I was that one of my favorite quotes from all of the Select Committee’s public hearings didn’t make it into this chapter. During his testimony, Herschmann recalled how unqualified Clark would be for the Acting AG role. “Clark's proposal was nuts. I mean this guy, at a certain point, listen, the best I can tell is the only thing you know about environmental and elections challenges is they both start with E. And based on your answers tonight, I'm not even certain you know that.”)

The meeting lasted three hours. It was only towards the end that Trump reversed his decision. He realized Clark wouldn’t be able to do anything in the wake of mass resignations. Clark tried to change Trump’s mind, but to no avail.

Later that evening, Trump called Donoghue to discuss another conspiracy theory about a truck with shredded ballots that was in ICE custody outside of Atlanta. The DOJ looked into it. The truck was indeed full of shredded ballots — but ballots from a previous election so as to make room for storing ballots from the 2020 election.

4.15 President Trump’s Unprecedented Attempt to Subvert the DOJ

Despite Trump’s efforts, senior DOJ officials (such as Rosen and Donoghue) stopped Trump from co-opting the Department for his own corrupt purposes.