Donald Trump’s white whale is his refusal to accept his election loss in 2020. He wants to set the precedent that any election in which the people don’t choose the way he likes is invalid. So Trump is ordering the DOJ to keep promoting his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
The Washington Post reports:
In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992. …
[Fulton] county, which includes part of Atlanta, was the epicenter of false allegations of voter fraud during the 2020 election, arising from a water leak at the ballot counting facility and wheeled ballot containers that were mischaracterized as unauthorized suitcases. Two election workers won a defamation case against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading falsehoods about them that led to threats. …
On Thursday, Harmeet Dhillon, a former Trump campaign legal adviser who now heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, followed up by requesting to inspect the ballots. The letter, obtained by The Post, said the division is investigating compliance with federal laws on administering elections.
Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said he was confused by the Justice Department’s involvement in efforts to review ballots from an election that has already been repeatedly scrutinized.
“It makes no sense to me to continue to look at the 2020 elections,” he said. “Audit after audit, review after review, where does it end? One more time? Two more times?”
This report quotes Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who names the motive for these bogus investigations: “Trump can finally be able to say … ‘My lies were actually the truth.’” Trump is using the DOJ, not just for an attack on justice, but for an attack on the truth itself.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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