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Committee is investigating. this preliminary report tells us a lot of alarming things we did not know before about how the justice department ended up right in the middle of all of this stuff. some ways unwitting and some ways witting. some of what emerges really is just remarkable. this guy jeff clark, who was given b.j. pak s cellphone number and he was saying who s going to call me? why is he going to call me? jeffrey clark, unknown justice department official. he was the head of the environmental division. they made him acting head of the civil division for a short time. we now know in detail that he does appear to have launched a plot with trump in which they were going to have the justice department assert that there were ongoing serious investigations into serious allegations, serious and credible allegations of election ....
Federal prosecutors around the country, use the resources of your office to chase this down. it s not the way the u.s. justice department is supposed to work. now that we know the justice department did work that way under trump, what s the justice department going to do about it? what is the justice department doing with this new knowledge that its senior officials, up to the highest levels of the department, attorney general, deputy attorney general, they tried to use the department. once you at a senior level use the powers of that department for that purpose, it can t be that you just get to leave and move on and the next person who holds that job gets to then try it again? what is the justice department going to do here? how does the justice department clean up after this mess? i don t know what will happen to trump. i don t know what will happen to jeff clark here. what s the justice department ....
U.s. attorneys in michigan and pennsylvania. he as the deputy attorney general of the united states justice department told u.s. attorneys in michigan and pennsylvania that they should use justice department resources to go check that out. to try to substantiate these nonsense claims that were coming from the white house. to be clear, these claims about voter fraud in michigan and pennsylvania, these didn t bubble up from local law enforcement efforts in michigan and pennsylvania and that s how they got to the u.s. attorney s office there. no. these u.s. attorneys got calls from main justice in d.c., the number two official in the united states department of justice, the trump appointed deputy attorney general in his official capacity telling u.s. attorneys in those states to pursue these made-up claims that president trump was using to cast doubt on the election. in the end, he threatened to quit if trump went ahead with this crazy scheme. but leading up to that, he helped trump use t ....
Were ridiculous allegations to pursue them beyond the point where they were credible begins to take you outside of the scope of the protection of doing legitimate law enforcement investigations. in any event, there are a lot of dealt of justice policies about what you do when, when you are closing in on an investigation, when you are in that sensitive period around the elections and around the count. i suspect they were sloppy about this. there s the rules we have talked about before about contacts between the department of justice and the white house. it appears a lot of this may well have been done outside of the rules that allow contact between the white house and the department of justice. there s plenty of fodder for the ig and office of professional responsibility to look at. even if the people have moved on, they can still do a report to see what preventative measures should be put into procedures so this can t happen ....
Benner who has been crushing this story since before day one. thank you, again, for making time to be here and understanding this reporting. it remains one of the most amazing stories of our time. thanks for having me. in terms of this interim report by the judiciary committee, what materials they want access to, what they still want to get? from what i know about baseball, i would say we re in the third or fourth inning. they want to speak with jeff clark, for example, who is somebody who has not responded to any of their requests. as you can see from this report, we have a full picture of what the experience was like on the justice department side, how they felt getting these requests from the white house to help upend the result of the election. what their testimony, their notes, their extensive handwritten notes, emails and ....