Ex-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark violated ethics rules in a bid to help Donald Trump challenge the 2020 election results, a DC Bar official said in a hearing Tuesday.
we can do it safely indeed. dr. jha, dr. offit, guys, thank you very, very much. coming up, fresh evidence of former president trump s attempts to stage some sort of coup. we have new details that have emerged just now about the alarm it caused inside the u.s. justice department. and later powerful allies of the new york governor governor cuomo are jumping ship and telling him to step aside. the stronger, lasts-longer energizer max. alright, guys, no insurance talk on beach day. -i m down. -yes, please. [ chuckles ]
general, they are all sifting through it to uncover the lengths that trump and his allies went to push their claims of election fraud to hopefully get the election overturned, in their view. and this probably won t be the last that we hear. the doj has told trump officials they can participate in congress s investigation, whether it pertains to january 6th or these claims of election fraud. and, wolf, it appears that some of these doj officials are already talking. they re also sharing their notes and documents from what turned out to be these very fateful weeks between the election and january 6th, probably more to come here, wolf. i suspect there s a lot more to come. all right, jessica, thank you very much. let s discuss this and more with cnn political director david chalian, dana bash, and asha. david chalian, this is so stark because if trump had succeeded, for all practical purposes, potentially there could have been a coup. this is the makings of a
coup. that s what you re seeing. and what we have here, it s kind of amazing. you have a tale of two jeffreys, two draft letters. one jeffrey rosen, the acting attorney general, his chief of staff having this draft resignation letter for fear that rosen s about to be fired because he won t agree with the president s direction to do something improper against the law. i mean, that s what the guy who s, like, running the department of justice in the trump administration prepares in a resignation letter. and on the other side, wolf, you have this other letter from jeffrey clark, the assistant attorney general who clearly was making his favor with trump known and drafted this absurd letter to georgia officials to get involved and actually boost the election lie. i mean, these two things were happening simultaneously inside the same justice department. it s hard to believe that this was actually happening during these final days of the
our justice ceorrespondent has more for us. how close were they to actually resigning? we re learning that at least one top doj official had his resignation letter drafted and ready. but he never actually sent it. and this week that official patrick hovakimian, he talked for three hours to investigators on the house oversight committee about what he went through. he was chief of staff for then acting attorney general jeffrey rosen. he wrote his resignation letter on january 3rd. he expected that rosen would be fired by donald trump for refusing the former president s, quote, direct instructions to use the doj to back up false claims of election fraud. it was on that same day, the first sunday in january where trump summoned the acting attorney general rosen and jeffrey clark to the white house to have this apprentice-style showdown. each of them essentially making their case. and at that same time, we ve learned that several doj