?Pure insanity?: How Trump and his allies pressured the Justice Department to help overturn the election

Trump contemplated installing him as attorney general, as other Justice Department leaders considered resigning en masse.[Trump entertained plan to install an attorney general who would help him pursue baseless election fraud claims]The new details laid out in hundreds of pages of emails and other documents released Tuesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee show how far Trump and his allies were willing to go in their attempts to use the Justice Department to overturn Biden’s win — a campaign whose full contours are still coming into view five months after Trump left office.The endeavor involved the White House chief of staff and an outside attorney, who peppered department officials with requests that they said came on behalf of Trump himself to investigate baseless claims of election fraud. “They should be ashamed.”In a December Oval Office meeting, the president entertained a series of radical measures, including military intervention, seizing voting machines and a 13th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court, people familiar with the meeting have said.[Trump pressures congressional Republicans to help in his fight to overturn the election]Once in command at the Justice Department, Rosen began to feel intense pressure directly from the White House.On Dec. 29, Trump aide Molly Michael emailed Rosen, Donoghue and then-acting solicitor general Jeffrey B. Wall a draft of a Supreme Court filing, which would have the Justice Department challenge the election results in six states.“The President asked me to send the attached draft document for your review,” Michael wrote, adding that she had also shared it with Trump’s chief of staff and the White House counsel.That month, the Supreme Court had thrown out an effort by the state of Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin over how they conducted their elections, asserting that Texas had not shown a legal interest “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” The draft filing would have essentially had the U.S. government take the place of Texas in the case, and also challenge elections in Arizona and Nevada.That same day, the emails show, a lawyer named Kurt Olsen wrote to Wall, saying the president had “directed me to meet with AG Rosen today to discuss a similar action to be brought by the United States.” Olsen wrote that he had called and texted the acting attorney general multiple times but had not been able to reach him.“This is an urgent matter,” Olsen wrote.The Justice Department, though, did not seem to share Olsen’s assessment of the situation. And Clark, unlike others in the department, was more sympathetic to Trump’s claims of fraud.According to people familiar with the matter, Clark became particularly focused on Georgia, trying to persuade department leaders to issue a letter that argued that state’s elections were affected by fraud, and that — as a consequence — its lawmakers should disregard the results and appoint their own electors.[Election results under attack: Here are the facts]Unbeknown to all but a few people at the Justice Department, Trump was contemplating installing Clark as attorney general. But the pressure kept coming.Over the course of just a few hours on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, Meadows, the chief of staff, sent Rosen three emails flagging possible problems with the election — including fraud allegations in Georgia and New Mexico and the YouTube link with its claim of an Italian plot.“Can you believe this?” an exasperated Rosen wrote to Donoghue at one point, forwarding a request by Meadows to examine purported signature match anomalies in Fulton County, Ga. “I am not going to respond.”Rosen also told his deputy that he had been asked to meet with the person in the video: Brad Johnson, president of a group called Americans for Intelligence Reform, who says on the organization’s website he is a retired CIA operations officer.Rosen told Donoghue he had resisted, asserting that if Johnson had information to share, he could walk into the FBI’s Washington Field Office and turn it over.