10-08-2021, 03:08 PM
(CNN)Donald Trump always seems to get away with it. And he's trying to do it again.
The ex-President and his Republican apologists in Congress are jump-starting a new effort to dampen the consequences of his crimes against democracy, burying the truth about what can now objectively be termed a coup attempt.
A flurry of new and shocking behind-the-scenes details of Trump's multi-pronged attempts to steal last November's election are showing just how perilously close the country came to a constitutional disaster in January.
- A new report from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats on Thursday found that Trump tried a stunning nine times to get his Justice Department to undermine the election.
- The report also details an extraordinary three-hour meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump tried to win support for a plan to install as acting attorney general a loyalist, Jeffrey Clark, who he thought would help him overturn the 2020 election. In the end, the ex-President was talked out of the move after being told it would trigger mass Justice Department resignations.
- Trump indicated that he will try to assert executive privilege to prevent the House select committee probing the mob attack by his supporters on the US Capitol from getting information from certain witnesses.
- That panel sent two new subpoenas to two members of the "Stop the Steal" group, Ali Alexander and Nathan Martin, who were affiliated with the planning of the Washington rally that preceded the insurrection.
This rush of developments on just one day poses profound questions for Congress, the Biden administration and potentially the courts -- and follows other new evidence of Trump's anti-democratic conduct, including about a step-by-step plan drawn up by a conservative lawyer for how then-Vice President Mike Pence could subvert the constitutional process of certifying Biden's election win.
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