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A central conspiracy theory for MAGA world is the claim that government officials in 2020 conspired with social media platforms to aid Joe Biden in the election. That the government was weaponized against conservatives. And while there’s never been a scintilla of evidence to support this claim, we’ve gotten ample evidence — thanks to the House Jan. 6 committee — that a number of government officials, particular those at the DOJ, actually worked hard to help Donald Trump win.
And we got more details about alleged election meddling by Trump’s DOJ on Tuesday when a December report from the DOJ’s inspector general was made public. That report said that in 2020 department officials opened dubious investigations into states with Democratic governors and leaked info about those probes to the press with the apparent intent of influencing the election.
The partially redacted report says senior officials working in the Civil Rights Division (referred to as “CRT”) opened probes to investigate how health policies in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan that permitted some with Covid infections to remain in nursing homes may have contributed to Covid-related deaths. In August 2020, unnamed senior officials initiated these probes and ordered their staff to “focus specifically on New Jersey and New York despite having been provided data indicating that the nursing homes with the most significant quality of care issues were in other states,” the report says.
The report also said these probes showed little regard for the efficacy, legality or commonality of the policies in question:
Email records and witness testimony indicate that CRT leadership ultimately issued, and the Department publicly announced, the August 26 data requests to Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania without knowing whether the ‘offending’ state orders were still in effect (they were not, having been rescinded or revised months earlier), whether such orders were consistent with federal guidance at the time (they were largely consistent with federal guidance), or whether other states had issued similar orders (they had).
Noting that the DOJ issued a press release announcing the probes before Election Day, the report said that attorneys and public affairs staff who reviewed the release didn’t raise issues at the time but that “many of the current and now former Department employees who agreed to be interviewed by the OIG stated that they found both the fact that the Department issued a press release in this instance and its content to be unusual and inappropriate.”
The IG report says this was all part of an unnamed DOJ official’s plan to leak information to the New York Post about the department’s investigations into nursing homes deaths in New Jersey and New York. As evidence, the report quotes a text message from the senior official, who told an associate, “I’m trying to get [CRT] and CIV to do letters to [New Jersey/New York] respectively on nursing homes. Would like to package them together and let New York Post break it. Will be our last play on them before election but it’s a big one.”
The irony of course is that this sounds a lot like the conspiracy Republicans have been peddling about administration officials colluding with media on Biden’s behalf in 2020.
The report indicates that some of the DOJ employees who were assigned to the investigations raised questions about their validity but were given the impression by senior officials that the plans were being directed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr (Barr declined to sit with investigators for a voluntary interview). And the report says the officials involved in this alleged scheme appear to have violated ethics rules and potentially even federal laws around using a public office for political purposes.
Ultimately, the report paints a disturbing picture of attempted election interference. With Trump’s election hopes hanging in the balance and his own mishandling of the pandemic on full display, officials at his DOJ allegedly homed in on states led by Democrats and conspired to sandbag them with bad press ahead of the election. And keep in mind the report says this plot was effectuated through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which Trump wants to be led by MAGA loyalist Harmeet Dhillon this time around.
Given Dhillon’s track record of pursuing legal efforts to overturn Trump’s election defeat in 2020, there’s no reason to believe that she would rebuff similar efforts to influence future elections. And now that the Supreme Court effectively gave Trump carte blanche to use the DOJ as his personal law firm, the likelihood of similar efforts at election interference don’t seem too far-fetched.