Trump asked his AG about legal strategy to overturn election, Rosen tells senators
Donald Trump asked the country’s top legal official in late December about a conspiratorial draft complaint aimed at overturning the 2020 election results, according to a previously unreported account of Trump’s phone call with former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Rosen persuaded Trump the lawsuit wasn’t a good idea, he told Senate investigators last weekend, two sources familiar with his testimony said. The previously unreported details underscore how hard DOJ lawyers worked to shoot down the increasingly harebrained legal strategies that reached the president’s desk.
Trump brought up the 54-page legal document in a phone call with Rosen in late December, weeks after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Why, the then-president wanted to know, wasn’t the Justice Department doing more about the election? The complaint was being circulated by an outside group helmed by Kurt Olsen, an attorney who had represented Texas in its own failed suit challenging Trump’s loss earlier that month, and some of the president’s allies found its logic compelling. [Continue reading…]