A new report from Republican senators suggests that Democrat allegations that President Trump tried to “weaponize” the Department of Justice over the results of the 2020 presidential election are political rhetoric, but not based on fact.
The 140-page report explains that Trump did not exert improper influence on the DOJ, that his statements about election fraud were based on “legitimate concerns” and his worries about widespread election fraud were based on “reports of crime.”
The report was released by Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and undermine allegations made by majority Democrats in their own partisan report.
Just the News explained the GOP conclusion was that based on “available evidence,” President Trump did not use the department to try to “overturn the election” as Democrats had alleged.
“The transcripts of this investigation speak for themselves, and they paint a very different picture from the left’s claims that the former president weaponized the Justice Department to alter the election results,” Grassley explained. “The available evidence shows that President Trump did what we’d expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations.”
The report found, among a long list of conclusions, that Trump “listened to his advisers, including high-level DOJ officials and White House counsel and followed their recommendations.”
Further, he twice rejected sending a draft letter, from the DOJ, recommending to some states with reported voter irregularities that they hold a legislative session to choose different electors.
Also, there was testimony President Trump had “no impact” on DOJ investigative actions on the election, and “did not fire anyone at the DOJ or FBI relating to his frustration that more wasn’t done to investigate election-related allegations.”
In fact, the investigation found, President Trump told others that he did not expect the DOJ to overturn the election, and it reported, “witnesses testified that they were not pressured by President Trump or the White House to take action with respect to investigating certain election fraud claims.”
What President Trump was concerned about, according to the evidence, were “legitimate complaints and reports of crimes.”
There also were witnesses who testified that “it was not unreasonable for President Trump to be concerned about legitimate complaints and reports of crimes.”
The report responded to Democrats’ claims against President Trump, who had been targeted throughout much of his first term in office by a conspiracy that has been tracked all the way up to 2016 failed candidate Hillary Clinton and then-President Barack Obama’s administration to falsely link President Trump to Russia.
Those now-debunked “Russiagate” claims suggested President Trump’s campaign was working with Russia in 2016. However, special FBI counsel Robert Mueller failed to find any evidence, and reports since then have come out describing how Clinton assembled a strategy of falsely linking Trump and Russia in order to distract the American public from her own scandal in which she, as secretary of state for Obama, put national secrets on her own, private email server.
Her campaign paid partly for the infamous Steele Dossier, a compilation of claims assembled by a former British agent who was using his own Russian contacts, that was trumpeted by leftists in the Obama administration and media as showing that Russia link.
The GOP report noted the Democrats’ continuation of that type of political strategy.
“Three days after President Biden’s inauguration, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, under the leadership of incoming Chairman Richard J. Durbin, launched an investigation into President Trump’s management of the Department of Justice following the 2020 election. Through their investigation, Committee Democrats focused on the weeks from December 14, 2020, to January 3, 2021, and sought to show that during his final days in office, President Trump nearly prompted a constitutional crisis with an alleged plot ‘to use’ and ‘weaponize DOJ’ in order to ‘subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.'”
The report continued, “Democrats focused much of their efforts on a January 3, 2021, Oval Office meeting where, despite his expressed concerns that Acting Attorney General Rosen had not adequately performed his job to investigate election fraud allegations, President Trump twice rejected terminating him. Moreover, in that same meeting, President Trump twice rejected DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark’s idea for DOJ to send a letter to state legislatures that recommended they convene to pick electors. In pushing their inaccurate narrative, Chairman Durbin stated, via Twitter, on June 4, 2021, before all evidence had been reviewed and any witnesses interviewed, that: ‘What my office found in our investigation is a five alarm fire for democracy, underscoring the depths of the White House’s efforts to influence the electoral vote certification. I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize DOJ in his election subversion scheme.'”
The GOP report noted Democrats have claimed Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, “pressured DOJ to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election in an attempt to nullify the results.”
The GOP report documented, “Neither the available documents nor testimony provided to the committee support such a statement.”
A DOJ witness, in fact, characterized Meadows as forwarding information, but being “deferential to DOJ” regarding decisions on what to investigate.
Further, the Democrats based some of their conclusions on leftist media reports, not the facts, the GOP report said.
And even more, when Biden took office, DOJ officials prevented witnesses from answering questions “pertaining to the types and number of election related allegations the DOJ investigated,” the report said.
“The documentary evidence to-date, once considered in proper context and stripped of political insinuations, shows that the facts differed sharply from the narrative that the Democrats attempted to create,” the report found.
The reality is, the report said, “Throughout President Trump’s interactions with DOJ officials concerning election matters, he did not abuse his constitutional authority with respect to his conduct toward DOJ. … He expressed concern with ensuring that DOJ was doing its job of fully investigating allegations of election fraud so that the American people would have confidence in the results of the 2020 election…”
The report found:
“The available facts and evidence show that President Trump listened to his senior DOJ and White Hosue advisers at every step of the fact pattern presented by this investigation and that he did not weaponize DOJ for his personal or campaign purposes. The records acquired by the committee show that the president’s concerns centered on what he perceived as an attack on the electoral system and his firm belief that the American people had been wronged by election fraud that undermined the sanctity of the 2020 election. With these concerns in hand, President Trump’s approach to DOJ was to ensure that it was aware of election fraud allegations and that, with knowledge of those allegations, they were actually doing their job to investigate them.”
Multiple audits and investigations are continuing even now in several states into the processes of the 2020 election. In Arizona, suspicious ballots were uncovered many times the number that would have been needed to change for Biden to lose.
What is known, and also now is being investigated, is how and why various local and state officials simply changed or ignored state laws requiring elections to accommodate mail-in ballots during the 2020 election. The Constitution allows only state lawmakers to make such changes, and they didn’t.
Further, that there could have been undue influence also is under investigation, as leftist Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook handed out some $350 million in grants to various leftist election officials for them to run their operations during the 2020 race. Sometimes that money was used for “get-out-the-vote” campaigns that could be used to target certain types of voters.
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