Bombshell Senate report identifies pro-Trump lawmaker who helped install coup advocates at DOJ

On Thursday, POLITICO reported that a Pennsylvania congressman is at the heart of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation on former President Donald Trump's efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The new report indicates that Rep. Scott Perry (R), who led the objection to certifying Pennsylvania's 2020 electoral votes, played a key role in attempting to get Trump loyalists installed at the Justice Department.

"In the last weeks of Trump's administration, according to the new Senate Judiciary Committee majority report, the former president asked Richard Donoghue — then the Justice Department's second-in-command — for his cell number so lawmakers concerned about the election could call him," reported Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney. "Perry (R-Pa.) was one of the lawmakers who ended up with the principal associate deputy attorney general's phone number."

"The report details that Perry contacted Donoghue on Dec. 27, saying Trump himself had suggested the call, and raised false election claims. Perry told Donoghue, the report states, that there were 'things going on in Pennsylvania' with regard to ballot-counting that he found improper," continued the report. "Perry also recommended to Donoghue that Jeffrey Clark, then the head of the Justice Department's civil division, should become more involved in DOJ's handling of the 2020 election. Trump later considered Clark as a replacement for the acting attorney general, seeing Clark as more sympathetic to claims of voter fraud that have proven baseless."

Clark ultimately went on to be a key player in the effort to try to delegitimize Georgia's election results, and some federal prosecutors expect him to face sanctions or even criminal prosecution.

Perry, a Trump ally who has claimed that incoming Afghan refugees will "rape and kill" American girls and pushed neo-Nazi conspiracy theories, has faced calls to resign in his home state for his role in Trump's attack on the election process.

"Today's report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis. Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the Department to his will," said Senate Judiciary chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL).

"But it was not due to a lack of effort. Donald Trump would have shredded the Constitution to stay in power. We must never allow this unprecedented abuse of power to happen again."