What this new Donald Trump – Jeffrey Rosen bombshell really means
This morning I warned you that with the way things were going, the bombshell revelations about Donald Trump’s criminal scandals in office would keep getting uglier – and that in fact you want them to get uglier so it’ll force the issue as far as federal criminal prosecution. Sure enough, it just got a whole lot uglier.
This time it isn’t about Trump’s DOJ spying scandal, or even about Trump’s Capitol insurrection scandal. Instead it’s about Trump’s attempt at forcing government officials to help him overthrow the election results from within. We all recall when Attorney General Bill Barr abruptly “resigned” in mid-December, and was replaced by Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Now the New York Times is reporting that Trump began pressuring Rosen to help him try to illegally overturn the election result on the same day that Trump announced Barr was out. Trump then spent a period of weeks trying to push Rosen to have the DOJ ask the Supreme Court to overturn the election. Rosen reportedly kept fending Trump off, and at one point Trump nearly ousted Rosen in favor of pro-Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. There’s a lot to unpack here.
For instance, if this reporting is correct, then Rosen did a great thing in standing his ground against Trump, and should be commended for it. Of course he’s now likely to spend the next few years having to testify nonstop to congressional committees, grand juries, and trial juries, as he had a front row seat to the biggest criminal scandal in American history.
Also it’s more clear than ever that Trump committed felony election fraud. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was also knee deep in illegally pressuring Rosen. And Rudy Giuliani had his fingerprints all over this scandal, as usual. Given that all three of them were trying to illegally overturn election results in Georgia, and that the Fulton County Georgia District Attorney already has a grand jury going in the Trump election tampering scandal, it’s difficult to imagine any scenario where Trump, Meadows, and Giuliani aren’t criminally indicted in Georgia.
On the federal level, this new revelation is going to make it a whole lot easier for the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump and the others involved in the scandal. Or to put it another way, this will make it a whole lot harder for the DOJ not to bring federal charges against them.
But the bottom line is that this was never going to work out for Donald Trump no matter how it had played out. Even if Rosen had caved, or even if Rosen had been replaced with Clark, the Supreme Court was never going to entertain any of this nonsense. We know this because the Supreme Court ended up ruling unanimously against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
What’s remarkable is that Donald Trump went this deep into criminal territory in an effort to keep himself in power, and it was such a stupid plan that it still had no chance of working. When you combine this with how stunningly stupid and inept his incitement of the Capitol attack was, Trump will go down as the most brazen criminal in American history, and the stupidest criminal in American history.
