eight members of the department of justice who said we ll resign if you take rosen out of the picture and put clark in, jeffrey clark in, if those efforts weren t made, we could have seen a collapse of that department of justice into a political entity. and, really, you know, the republicans are saying in their version of the report, guys, that in the end, the president took the advice of the senior officials, but if you read this report, you will see how close we came to the president, the former president, pressuring the justice department to try to weigh in and try to put essentially pressure on the states to send electors, a separate slate of electors and january 6th could have turned out a lot different if those efforts had succeeded. the evidence is mounting, but so is the revisionism for many in the republican party. thank you very much. let s discuss with elie honig. good to have you.
with the cia to overturn votes in several states. we also learned from this report that multiple officials including pat cipollone and other lawyers at the white house threatened to resign because of what the president was trying to get the justice department to do. we know that the president was working, jeffrey clark, at the time, a low level official, nobody ever heard of, and he was essentially pushing for the justice department to tell the states that the justice department had found perhaps some irregularities in the states, which they had not. and so right now what we know is that the report is out, the republicans say that the president never actually told these people to do anything wrong. here is senator durbin talking about what they found in this report. our report shows in detail how relentless this president was, were it not for jeffrey rosen, richard donoghue and
appointee, he saw through what texas was trying to do and writes this in part, fully aware that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, meaning the right to abortion, the state contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme to do just that. but the judge went on to note the reality on the ground here for women in texas is that women are still getting abortions. they re just not getting them in texas. women who have the means and opportunity and the money can travel across state lines to places like louisiana and oklahoma to get abortions. and so that was the hook for the justice department to say, hey, look, this affects interstate commerce, commerce between the states, and so therefore the united states has an interest here to get this struck down. the judge was persuaded by that. and for several other reasons noticing that the feds have a federal interest here in protecting a woman s right to an abortion, but i sh
request for documents tied to their communications on the day of the insurrection. and also just within the last hour, the senate judiciary committee releasing a damning report detailing how trump and a top doj lawyer attempted to overturn the 2020 election. cnn s senior justice correspondent evan perez joining us now. what more are we learning, what else is new in this senate report? well, erica, this report paints a picture of the white house and people at the justice department, trying to fight over what to do with president trump s demands that the justice department weigh in on the election after, of course, after he had lost. we learned from this report that mark meadows, then the chief of staff, repeatedly was calling top officials at the time at the justice department asking them to try to investigate things including the bizarre italygate conspiracy. this is something that essentially says that there was an italian contractor working
court system? and now the department of justice is trying to stop the one case making its way through the court system, don mcgahn. they re trying to stymie that. yeah. we ve seen attorney general bill barr really act as president trump s personal lawyer. you ve heard from trump s personal lawyers in these cases say the president should not have to agree to any subpoenas or turn over any documents. and he has control over his former officials and can direct them not to testify. now you re seeing the justice department weigh in essentially not go quite as far as saying all of these people are immune from having to testify. but really going further than what we ve seen in the past in terms of the justice department trying to protect the president and protect them from having people testify. and even going up against the courts who have already weighed in on this matter and said, yes, don mcgahn should have to testify and the people who the who work for the president have their freedo