Senator Chuck Grassley did his level best to smooth over the shocking and terrible news that Donald Trump conferred with Jeffrey Clark about ways to overthrow the will of the voters in 2020 and subvert the election. As we reported over the weekend, Clark met with Trump more than once after the election to plan ways to steal 6 states' electors for Biden and change them to Trump.
It's looking very bad for Trump and Clark. It's quite likely criminal investigations will bloom out of these revelations, especially after Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee over the weekend -- testimony he was anxious to give before someone "intervened" to prevent him from doing so.
On Monday, Chuck Grassley tried to play Sir Galahad and rescue Trump from the very bad place he is in by arguing that Trump was entitled to confer with his "closest advisers" in order to paper over the fact that a coup d'etat was being planned inside the White House.
“The president has every right to discuss ideas and strategies with his closest advisers,” Grassley intoned. “The president, whether that president is a Democrat or Republican, should feel unrestrained to bring ideas to his closest staff for robust discussion. Eventually the facts will come out, and Trump will have to address them – good or bad – depending on the facts at hand.”
As a reminder, these are the "ideas" Trump was discussing with his "closest adviser" who had never seen the inside of the White House or spoken to Trump until after the election and after Bill Barr had resigned, as Red Painter wrote:
He also "described subsequent exchanges with Mr. Clark, who continued to press colleagues to make statements about the election that they found to be untrue, according to a person familiar with the interview. He also discovered that Mr. Clark had been engaging in unauthorized conversations with Mr. Trump about ways to have the Justice Department publicly cast doubt on President Biden’s victory, particularly in battleground states that Mr. Trump was fixated on, like Georgia."
Yikes. And, of course, Clark drafted that letter for Rosen to sign that basically said the election was corrupt, and that Georgia should void Joe Biden's victory. (Remember, it would not have made a difference if Georgia went to Trump...Biden had enough electoral college votes already.)
But sure, tell us more about how those discussions with the "closest advisers" should go. Clark was nothing more than Trump's lackey, looking for ways to overturn the will of the voters for a man who just could not bear the burden of being known as a loser.
Every Republican is now nothing more than a lemming following Trump off the cliff. Grassley will rue the day he put these words on the record, and the truth will come out.
