- Donald Trump lashed out after the release of documents showing him pressuring DoJ officials.
- The documents show Trump urging them to say last year’s election was “corrupt.”
- In a statement on Saturday, Trump repeated the election fraud claims in his bid to overturn the election.
Former President Donald Trump, in an at times contradictory statement, responded to the release of documents that showed him pressuring officials at the Justice Department to subvert last year’s election.
In the statement released on Saturday, Trump denied that the documents showed that he sought to overturn last year’s election while repeating the baseless voter fraud claims that have been central to his bid to delegitimize Joe Biden’s win.
The documents were released by the House Oversight Committee Friday. They contained hand-written notes of a call between former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Donald Trump on December 27 taken by Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, who was also present on the call.
“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” Trump told the officials in the call, according to the notes. The officials responded that no evidence had been uncovered by the DoJ to substantiate the president’s claim.
Yuri Gripas-Pool/Getty Images
In his statement, Trump said the documents do not show he attempted to overturn the election yet repeated his election fraud claims and offered no new evidence to show they are credible.
“The corrupt and highly partisan House Democrats who run the House Oversight Committee yesterday released documents—including court filings dealing with the rigged election of 2020—that they dishonestly described as attempting to overturn the election,” Trump said.
“In fact, it is just the opposite. The documents were meant to uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote,” he added. “The American People want, and demand, that the President of the United States, its chief law enforcement officer in the country, stand with them to fight for Election Integrity and to investigate attempts to undermine our nation.”
Trump has pushed his election fraud “Big Lie” since losing the contest last year. Amid rumors that he is gearing up for another bid for political office, the claim has become the center of his propaganda campaign.
Last week a special House committee began probing the January 6 Capitol riot, in which Trump supporters motivated by Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories attacked the Capitol in a bid to halt Biden’s certification as president.
One of the focuses on the inquiry will be the extent to which Trump’s claims instigated the violence and his actions leading up to the violence, and new evidence has emerged in recent days of the pressure Trump placed Rosen under to back his election fraud claims.
