This past weekend, former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified for hours to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and during a new appearance on MSNBC, committee member Sen. Richarrd Blumenthal (D-Conn.) shared a broad recap of the troubling contents of Rosen’s testimony. Rosen served as acting attorney general amid intense efforts by then-President Donald Trump to use the Justice Department as part of his scheme to try and get Joe Biden’s election victory thrown out. According to a recent report from The New York Times about Rosen’s testimony to both the Senate and the office of the inspector general overseeing the Department of Justice, Trump was in direct contact with then-Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark regarding efforts to overthrow the election.
Sen. Blumenthal: "Let me be very blunt…Donald Trump mounted a pressure campaign that was absolutely relentless, brutal, personally involved, directly aimed at the Dept. of Justice — seeking to break it and weaponize it — to overthrow the election." https://t.co/F9wXOePqtD
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 9, 2021
Blumenthal said on MSNBC that, listening to Rosen’s testimony, he “was struck by how close this nation came to catastrophe,” adding that the “American people deserve to know as well.” Blumenthal added as follows:
‘Let me very blunt. The president of the United States, then Donald Trump, mounted a pressure campaign that was absolutely relentless, brutal, personally involved, directly aimed at the Department of Justice, seeking to break it and weaponize it to overthrow the election. He sought, in effect, to engineer the Department of Justice taking his side in calling the election corrupt and overthrowing it. And he was relentless in seeking that goal. And so only the Department of Justice refusing to break, standing up to him, was the means to avoid that kind of catastrophe.’
Blumenthal added that there were “threats to specific officials involving their job.” It’s previously been reported that Trump contemplated firing Rosen and replacing him with Clark, which clearly could have been disastrous for the continuance of democracy in the United States, considering Clark’s alliance with Trump. Clark’s efforts — which he undertook, apparently, at least in connection to direct contacts with Donald Trump — included a letter that he wanted the Justice Department to send to Georgia officials, urging them to start a special legislative session to examine supposed fraud in the state. In reality, no legitimate evidence of systematic election fraud has ever been present, but state legislators in areas Biden won nevertheless faced pressure from certain Trump allies to appoint members of the electoral college from their respective jurisdictions that would support Trump instead of Biden.
Blumenthal added that “what Jeffrey Rosen told us raises more questions that need to be answered with more witnesses.” Watch below:
