Another Day, Another Trump Coup Plot Revealed

It seems like just yesterday the Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley defended Donald Trump’s sacred right to plot a coup in the White House on the grounds that he never actually managed to get his staff to go through with it. But in reality, it was Monday.

Channeling his inner Sideshow Bob, Grassley insisted that it was totally fine for the president to try to put Jeffrey Clark in charge of the Justice Department after he promised to announce investigations of non-existent vote fraud in six swing states. Because he was too incompetent to make it happen, so no harm, no foul.

“Did Trump fire Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen? No, he did not fire him. Did Trump fire Rich Donoghue, Rosen’s deputy? No, he did not.”

No one got fired, so we’re cool here, right?

Well, about that …

The New York Times got the skinny on the testimony of Byung “BJ” Pak, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, and it turns out that he was pushed out for his refusal to accede to Trump’s demand to publicly state that Georgia’s election had been tainted by fraud.

Toldja.

On the infamous January 2 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pressuring him to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” Trump complained about Pak, calling him “Your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there.” Never mind that Trump himself had appointed Pak in 2017.

At Bill Barr’s insistence, Pak had dutifully investigated claims of fraud that had already been debunked by the Georgia Bureau of Investigations — despite vehement objection by career FBI officials in the Public Integrity Section that it was inappropriate for the DOJ to weigh in while the votes were being tallied, Politico reports.

But there was nothing to find, and Pak refused to lie and say that there was. So on the evening of January 3, he got an email from Deputy AG Richard Donoghue saying “Please call ASAP,” and the next day he resigned to “pre-empt a public dismissal,” as the Times put it. Which seems to be reporter-speak for “allowed to leave the building without Trump tweeting out a bat signal for the MAGA loons to harass him for the rest of his life.”

And instead of Pak’s assistant Kurt Erskine taking over, the position was filled by Bobby Christine, then USA for the Southern District of Georgia “by written order of the President.” Christine marched into the office with a squad of outside election attorneys, while blithely assuring his new colleagues, “I’m not coming up here to be an election lawyer. I’m not coming here for that purpose.”

Spoiler Alert: He was.

“Quite frankly, just watching television you would assume that you got election cases stacked from the floor to the ceiling,” he said on a call with his staff which was immediately leaked to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I am so happy to find out that’s not the case, but I didn’t know coming in.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement of his predecessor BJ Pak, who had already investigated the same claims. But in fact Christine couldn’t find those 11,780 votes either, although he wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, because REASONS.

“I would love to stand out on the street corner and scream this, and I can’t,” he said on the same leaked call.

Look, after four years of this craziness, we are long past hoping that there will be a prosecution for the brazen abuse of executive power. But this was an appalling attempt to weaponize the Justice Department to keep Trump in the White House after he lost the election. And we should be screaming from the rooftops about it.

Former U.S. attorney in Atlanta says Trump wanted to fire him for not backing election fraud claims. [NYT]
Emails: Senior DOJ officials wrangled over baseless Trump voter fraud allegations [Politico]

---

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.