New details on Trump's bid to overturn election -Dems

[SEN. DICK DURBIN]: “Former President Donald Trump would have shredded the Constitution to keep his office and the presidency.”

A new report released Thursday laid out the lengths to which Democrats say Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to overturn the presidential election result – including by trying to oust its top official.

[DURBIN]: “We were a half-step away from a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

The review by the Senate Judiciary Committee – chaired by Democrat Dick Durbin - details how Trump was growing angry that acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen would not launch a public investigation into the false claim that Trump's defeat to now-President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.

Rosen himself had taken the reigns from William Barr, who resigned as Attorney General in the weeks after the election after publicly undercutting Trump by saying that the DOJ found no sign of systemic voter fraud.

According to the Senate review, Trump ultimately tried to remove Rosen by asking Jeffrey Bossert Clark, then a senior Justice Department official and Trump loyalist, to step into the AG role.

Durbin on Thursday laid out why that didn’t happen.

“The White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, dissented from the President’s position, and said it was a murder-suicide act for him to engage in this. Secondly, at the point, the eight leading officials in the Dept. of Justice all signed a letter saying that they would resign en masse if there was a replacement of the Acting Attorney General by Mr. Clark.”

That meeting, Durbin said, took place on January 3rd.

“We know what followed. In a matter of three 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 United States Capitol three days later on January 6th. The President turned loose a mob, a mob that was supposed to stop us from counting the electoral votes and electoral ballots.”

Republicans on the committee issued their own report, which drew different conclusions.

Ranking Member Chuck Grassley said Trump (quote) "did what we’d expect a president to do on an issue of this importance: He listened to his senior advisers and followed their advice and recommendations."