Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Did Trump Plan to Remove Attorney General to Change Election Results?


Sat 23 Jan 2021 | 03:41 PM
Omnia Ahmed

Former US President Donald Trump was about to remove then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and use the Department of Justice to undo Georgia's election results, The New York Times reported Friday.

Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who appealed to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, met with Trump earlier this month and told Rosen following the meeting that Trump was going to replace him with Clark. Then, Clark would move to keep Congress from certifying the election results in US President Joe Biden's favor, according to the paper.

Nonetheless, Rosen wanted to hear the news straight from Trump, and arranged a meeting on the evening of January 3.

Rosen and Clark had a meeting with Trump, White House counsel Pat Cipollone and other lawyers, in which the former president asked them to state their cases for him, the Times added.

It also cited two officials who compared Rosen's and Clark's opposing arguments to an episode of "The Apprentice," Trump's old reality TV show.

The department leadership agreed that they would all resign if the attorney general were fired, which helped sway Trump from removing his acting attorney general, the paper cited four former Trump administration officials.

The former president decided after nearly three hours to allow the Attorney General stay and affirmed that Clark's plan would not work.

Clark defensed himself and told the Times that its report contained unspecified inaccuracies and that he could not speak to his conversations with Trump or department lawyers.

"Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties," he told the paper. "All my official communications were consistent with law."

On his part, Trump declined to comment to the reports; however, one of his advisers stated that the former President had pushed for investigating "rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years" and "any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken."