Donald Trump is ratcheting up his demands for the Justice Department to forge ahead with a fresh inquiry of his debunked claims the 2020 elections were cruelly stolen from him.
Behind closed doors and in public, the president, who has never conceded his defeat, is applying ever greater pressure on his administration to uncover evidence of electoral fraud behind Joe Biden’s victory, The Washington Post reports.
“I hope the DOJ pursues this with ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last Sunday. “If not, it will happen again, including the upcoming Midterms.”
Recent moves on that front reportedly include the White House hiring a lawyer who previously worked on Trump’s efforts to contest the 2020 polls. MAGA administration officials have also apparently made inquiries about inspecting the voting equipment that was used in Missouri and Colorado, as well as seeking information on mail-in ballots from Atlanta.
President Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and by a 51.31% share of the popular vote to Trump’s 46.38%. The MAGA leader has since failed at every attempt to produce evidence to the contrary, while facing a litany of Congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions over his efforts to overturn the results.
The president’s warning that electoral fraud will “happen again” also comes as top members of his own party, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, voice alarm. There is worry for the party’s future electoral prospects under Trump’s second administration. Cruz in particular has warned the GOP may well be barreling toward a “bloodbath” come midterms.
Those sentiments would appear to be shared even by some White House aides. WaPo reports top members of the MAGA administration have grown weary of being labeled “election deniers” over a now five-year-old conspiracy theory. This shift is signaled by a growing push to focus more on the upcoming polls.
But Trump’s fevered refusal to let the issue go also comes as he forges ahead with a long-promised campaign of retribution against his political enemies. DOJ prosecutors are currently pursuing charges against former FBI director James Comey, whom the president holds responsible for perpetrating the supposed Russiagate “hoax,” and against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who once sued Trump for mortgage fraud.
As those widely decried prosecutions gather pace, Trump is now furthering calls to “jail” not only Joe Biden, but also the Democratic president’s Attorney General Merrick Garland and former Special Counsel for the Department of Justice Jack Smith, who oversaw the Biden administration’s investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 polls.
The release last week of FBI files dating from 2020 to 2023, which outline some of the steps taken by Biden-era officials to investigate those responsible for falsely certifying a victory for Trump in 2020, has only buoyed those calls.
“What they did was criminal,” Trump told reporters at an Oval Office conference last month, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who are presently overseeing the president’s efforts to re-litigate the biggest fraud that never happened.
