How Trump Found the One Justice Department Lawyer Willing to Steal the Election

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The crucial moment in the fifth day of hearings by the House committee investigating January 6 was when Steven Engel, who was assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, testified about the bizarre meeting between the president and all the top brass of the Justice Department on January 3, 2021. Trump called the meeting to weigh the idea of replacing Acting Attorney General Jay Rosen (whose seat was barely warm after replacing Attorney General William Barr, who resigned in exasperation over Trump’s election fraud fables) with Jeffrey Clark, a former environmental lawyer serving as acting assistant attorney general. Clark was promising he’d send a blatantly illegal letter to 2020 battleground state legislatures encouraging them to immediately decertify Biden electors. Trump had already heard most of the lawyers in the room threaten immediate resignations if this happened. Here’s what Engel said when Trump asked his opinion:

All anyone is going to think is that you went through two Attorneys General in two weeks, until you found the environmental guy to sign this thing [the draft letters to state legislatures]. The story is not going to be that the Department of Justice found massive corruption that changed the course of the election. It’s going to be the disaster of Jeff Clark.

This remark, along with the specter Engel raised of a Justice Department in which his unqualified hand-picked AG would be “leading a graveyard” after mass resignations extending into the ranks of U.S. Attorneys, appeared finally convinced Trump to drop this particular avenue of insurrection. He instead shifted to the effort to convince Mike Pence to steal the election for him on January 6.

But to be very clear, Engel’s remark to his boss wasn’t just about the appearance of what Trump was doing: it was about the reality. Alerted repeatedly by Barr and his own lawyers (basically everyone but Rudy Giuliani and his hallucinatory band of Trump campaign legal firebugs) that there was no basis for overturning properly certified electors in any of the battleground states, Trump kept looking for someone with at least a shred of authority to do his bidding, despite the universal advice of everyone in DOJ (other than Clark and his crony Kenneth Klukowski, who appears to have written the letters at issue) that there was zero basis for the department’s involvement in any of these matters. So he found “the environmental guy” – or the guy found him with the help of an intermediary, congressman Scott Perry – and this avenue to an overturned election soon reached a dead end.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-trump-found-the-one-justice-department-lawyer-willing-to-steal-the-election/ar-AAYNKhw

[Turbineguy]

1. Did Clark know about Robert Bork

the famous Cox-sacker of Watergate?

[moniss]

2. Undoubtedly there were

some big-shots not necessarily in the government who knew this guy could/would "do things". Maybe for money or maybe just lust for power. Somebody or more than one person was involved in looking for a weasel.