According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, ex-President Donald Trump “pushed the Justice Department to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate President Biden’s victory” in the final weeks before Biden’s inauguration. According to a source for the Journal, the “pressure got really intense” after the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) brought against authorities in four states where Biden won, seeking the invalidation of the documented presidential election outcome in each of these places. The Trump team itself supported that lawsuit, and after it failed, Trump “began pushing for the Justice Department to file its own lawsuit against the states directly in the Supreme Court,” according to the Journal’s sources.
Then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen faced pressure from the then-president to file a Supreme Court case, but “[at] Mr. Rosen’s request, the solicitor general’s office prepared a brief memo with talking points he could use in an effort to explain to Mr. Trump why the lawsuit wasn’t legally viable,” according to the Journal’s reporting. A legal brief that the then-president wanted the Justice Department to file originated with one of Trump’s “outside lawyers,” according to the Journal. At various points, a slew of conspiracy-peddlers, from Rudy Giuliani to Sidney Powell, were involved in Trump’s election fight.
Besides the reported effort to attempt to pressure the Supreme Court into overturning the election, a scheme reportedly took shape involving removing Rosen entirely and replacing him with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who was supportive of the then-president’s unhinged lies about the electoral process. Clark denied that he concocted a plan to get Rosen removed as acting Attorney General, but according to The New York Times, Clark “wanted the [Justice Department] to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud,” which would have been disastrous no matter who was in charge.
Federal involvement outside of what already unfolded in spreading the lie that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election was dubious could’ve culminated in an official blind eye of sorts to the basic reality of the presidential election outcome, although there’s no particular indication that the Supreme Court would have accepted this perspective, no matter the court’s current conservative majority. No court anywhere in the country ever accepted the idea that systematic fraud swung the recent presidential election to Biden, and, despite certain Republican claims otherwise, courts did consider the actual supposed evidence.
