No one was more humiliating than a quote that reappeared during the last public hearing of the House of Representatives election commission investigating Thursday (January 6th). This came from a lengthy phone call between Trump, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donohue in December 2020.
The call, according to Donohue, who made notes at the same time, shows that the then president repeatedly pressured senior Justice Department officials for various false and conspiratorial allegations about the election – all of which Donohue fired.
At some point during the conversation, Trump seems angry. He begs Rosen and Donohue to “just say the election is corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Donohue said Thursday.
Yes. Think about it for a minute.
This is not the first time we have heard this line. CNN reported the existence of Donohue’s notes – and Trump’s quote in them – in July 2021.
But in the context of the case, which is being made by the commission on January 6, the quote is absolutely stunning and deeply revealing.
Think first of the impudence shown by Trump here. He asked the two highest-ranking officials of the Ministry of Justice at the time, who had repeatedly made it clear to him on the same call that his allegations of electoral fraud were false, to simply say that there had been fraud – and to be done with it.
Second, the quote reveals – or, in fact, reveals again – the complete misunderstanding (and contempt) that Trump had for the Department of Justice.
Again and again, from the first days of his rule, Trump has publicly expressed his disappointment that the Department of Justice will not simply carry out his orders.
Trump has repeatedly wondered – through his Twitter feed and his own public comments – why his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from investigating Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.
In an interview with Fox in August 2018, Trump asked Sessions, “What kind of person is this?”, Adding that he “never took control of the Department of Justice.” Trump fired Sessions the day after the 2018 election.
Despite the manual selection of Sessions’ successor, Bill Barr, Trump still complains that an investigation led by Special Prosecutor John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI investigation in Russia is not moving fast enough.
“If that’s the case, I think it’s awful,” Trump told conservative radio station Rush Limbaugh in October 2020, when asked about the possibility of Durham’s investigation not being released until after the election. “It’s very disappointing. And I will say [Barr] to his face. I think it’s a shame. It’s a shame. “
(It is worth noting: Not only does the Department of Justice seem to have a fundamental understanding of Trump’s authority over them. He repeatedly refers to “my generals” and “my army.”)
The third thing the quote reveals is that Trump really didn’t care – in any meaningful way – whether there was real electoral corruption or not. Recall that in the same telephone conversation in which Trump asked Rosen and Donohue “just to say that the election was corrupt,” he said that the various allegations he made about election fraud were untrue.
All Trump was interested in was to use the Justice Department’s imperm as a shield through which he could then direct his perception in favor of his election lies. In short: He knew that what he was saying was not confirmed by the facts. He didn’t care. He simply wanted the Ministry of Justice to say “corrupt” so that it could unite and shape this for its own purpose: to remain in office, no matter what.
It is not yet clear whether the commission will recommend criminal charges at the end of it all. Or whether the Justice Department will accuse Trump – or someone else – of their activities on January 6.
But what is clear is that Trump sees the Justice Department as another hand to carry out his agenda. He never knew or was interested in the independence of the Department of Justice or why it was (and is) crucial to the health of American democracy.
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