Elections

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, today, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report after an investigation of the circumstances surrounding Donald Trump's efforts to take over the Justice Department during the closing days of the last calendar year and beginning of this year.

Since January, the Committee has investigated reports that White House officials, including the President himself, pressed the Department of Justice to support President Trump's unsubstantiated bids to overturn the 2020 election results, and that Acting Civil Division Assistant AG Jeffrey Clark aided in that effort.

Today's interim staff report sheds new light on former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Jeffrey Clark became Donald Trump's Big Lie lawyer, pressuring his colleagues in the Department of Justice to force an overturn of the 2020 election.

Let me put this in perspective. The election was in November. The results were announced. Most of the world accepted it, but the former President, Donald Trump, never did. He filed a succession of lawsuits to prove that the election had been stolen. He failed in every effort in court. That was stage one.

Having failed in court with some of the most outlandish theories imaginable, but considered normal for the likes of Rudy Giuliani, they went into the second phase. The second phase was to coerce the Department of Justice and the Attorney General to intervene in the election results and to reach out directly, as the President did himself personally, to the election officials in States where he thought he should have won but he didn't.

So all that effort was under way when William Barr, President Trump's Attorney General at the time, issued a statement saying there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the election. That was disappointing to the President.

It occurred that in the middle of December of last year, William Barr, the Attorney General, announced that he was going to resign as of December 23. A man was chosen as the Acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, and Richard Donoghue as Deputy Attorney General.

There was a full court press on at that time by President Trump and his supporters to influence Jeffrey Rosen into intervening into this election contest. When I say ``full court press,'' I am talking about repeated telephone calls and meetings in the White House over a period of 2 weeks.

This report, which we have brought to the attention of the public, as well as members of the Committee, obviously, went into detail as to what happened during that 2-week period of time. It was an incredible moment, which most Americans didn't even know was going on. We were a half step away from a full-blown constitutional crisis because what the President was trying to do was to convince the Attorney General to contact the leaders in the States where he thought--the President thought he had won the election and to tell them to not certify the results and to pick an alternative set of electors in some instances.

In each of these cases, the President was--President Trump--pushing a theory on why he actually won. These theories went from crazy to silly, to outlandish.

Let me give you one of them. It was called Italy-gate. I hope you caught this one because, naturally, Rudy Giuliani was somehow involved with this--some notion that Italian satellites were intercepting the voting machines in America and changing the results against Donald Trump. That is the nature of things.

In the State of Georgia, the President and his supporters were arguing that they have videotapes proving that people brought in suitcases full of ballots, and they showed these videotapes. The election officials in Georgia--which, I might add, all Republican-- countered that by saying that those were actual containers of ballots and that was the ordinary process; there was nothing sinister going on there.

State after State, case after case, Trump was making the argument that he was cheated out of the election--which, of course, was false, but he still believes it to this day--and putting the pressure on Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to be complicit in this plot. He even asked him to consider filing a special case in the Supreme Court across the street to stop the election results from being certified.

Our report shows that Jeffrey Rosen and his Deputy, Richard Donoghue, resisted this from the start. Jeffrey Clark, another Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division who had nothing, literally, to do with this matter on a legal basis, were in conflict from that point--Clark, on the side of Trump, saying that the letters to the States should be issued, and Rosen and Donoghue arguing that there was no basis in fact, no proof of election fraud that could warrant that kind of unprecedented action.

In the meantime, many other players, like Mark Meadows in the White House, were also pressuring the Department of Justice. The net result of it was a fateful day--I believe it was January 3 of this year--when the President called Rosen, Donoghue, and Clark to the White House to pursue his effort to replace Rosen with Clark, a more complicit person in the process.

At that moment, two things happened that were significant. The White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, dissented from the President's position and said it was a murder-suicide pact for him to engage in this. Secondly, at that point, the eight leading officials in the Department of Justice all said that they would resign en masse if there was a replacement of the Acting Attorney General by Mr. Clark.

The President hesitated and decided at the very last minute not to pursue that course, not to replace him. That was significant, I will tell you, because had it happened otherwise, there would have been a possibility that there would have been a contest on the election results.

What did the President do next after deciding that? Well, just for good measure, he ended up forcing the resignation of the U.S. attorney in Georgia who refused to buy his outlandish claims. It was the President's way of protesting that particular U.S. attorney's--Mr. Cox--independence in the situation.

What followed? We know what followed. In a matter of 3 days, this President, former President, desperate in his situation, having failed in every court case, having failed to take over the Department of Justice, decided to take his cause to the streets. We saw it in the U.S. Capitol 3 days later on January 6. The President turned loose a mob--a mob that was supposed to stop us from counting the electoral votes and electoral ballots.

Most people say: Well, we heard most of this story before, so what is the point of it? The point of it is that we were so close to a constitutional crisis at that moment that it bears continued investigation and disclosure so the American people know that we should never be complacent when it comes to our rights as citizens and to our responsibilities to our Constitution.

This President, former President Donald Trump, would have shredded the Constitution to keep his office in the Presidency. There is no doubt in my mind.

To think that we reached that stage in history is certainly worth reflection for a moment. What more should we do going forward to make certain that we protect this democracy from the likes of Donald Trump or any of his successors in interest? That, I think, is a major responsibility that we face.

I hope this report from the Senate Judiciary Committee will reopen the conversation. I hope as well that the select committee of the House on the January 6 occurrence, the mob insurrection here at the Capitol-- we submitted this evidence to them. I hope it is a benefit to them as they move forward.

I certainly hope that, on a bipartisan basis, we can decide that the ordinary course of action with a valid, legal election deciding the future of this country is always the best route in a democracy.

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