Trump pressured justice head to 'just say election was corrupt'
Former president Donald Trump heavily pressured the US Department of Justice late last year to back his unsupported election fraud claims, pushing a top official to declare the vote "corrupt," documents released Friday showed. "Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me," Trump told then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes of his conversation with the president. Rosen told Trump in the extraordinary December 27, 2020 discussion that the department had looked into his claims of voter and ballot fraud and found no evidence. "Understand that the DOJ can't + won't snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election, doesn't work that way," Rosen told Trump, according to the notes taken by deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue. But Trump was desperate to reverse his November election defeat by now-President Joe Biden. "We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election," he said. The record of Trump's pressure on the department, just a week before his supporters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the election results, was released Friday by the House Committee on...