Trump is, if nothing else, consistent in his depraved tactics. - MaddowBlog
Former President Donald Trump sought inside help from the Justice Department to execute his campaign to reverse the 2020 election, according to evidence presented by the House Jan. 6 committee Thursday. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump implored top Justice officials in a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation memorialized in then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes.
When they resisted, the then-president moved forward with a plot, which he later abandoned, in which he’d replace the acting attorney general with Jeffrey Clark — an unqualified loyalist who was prepared to go along with the scheme to overturn the election results. Quite right. Trump had a lie and he needed it to be legitimized by federal law enforcement. If that happened, the White House, its messaging operation, and its shameless lackeys on Capitol Hill could leverage the lie and advance their plot to overturn the election.
At the time, the Republican was withholding congressionally approved military aid to our ally. During a one-on-one phone call, when his counterpart in Kyiv broached the subject of assistance, Trump responded, “What the then-American president wanted, of course, was for Zelensky to help with a Republican political scheme against Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election. Trump realized this was an extortion gambit. Indeed, that was the point.