'Shocking': Former prosecutor suspicious of MAGA lawmaker's backchannel to DOJ
Far-right Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) was exposed in a report this week to have had far closer ties to indicted former Trump Justice Department official Jeff Clark during the plots to overturn the 2020 presidential election than were previously reported.
This is astonishing, said former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC Thursday — and highly unusual.
"I'm curious, would it be the normal process to go from executive to Congress back to executive to get emergency security clearance like this?" asked anchor Ari Melber, himself an attorney. "And if not, what might that tell you with an investigative lens as you look at all this?"
"Well, of course it's not at all commonplace, and it's also not commonplace to be doing this with respect to somebody who was in the civil division, and part of that was the head of the environmental division," said Weissmann, who previously worked in the Robert Mueller investigation of Russia. "It had nothing to do with the Department of Justice looking at potential voter fraud. That's not his purview, as has been very, very clear. So this is really because they wanted Jeff Clark to issue a letter that was false on the part of the Department of Justice saying they were looking at fraud allegations."
"In fact, the D.C. indictment [of Trump] refers to Jeff Clark going further than that and saying — drafting a memo saying he actually found indications of fraud," Weissman continued. "It reminds me very much of what the former president did with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy. He wanted a foreign country to say that they were investigating his political rival. So to me it's exactly of a piece, which is using a trumped-up claim of a prosecutor looking into wrongdoing to say, ah, see, there's wrongdoing there with respect to either the election or to a political adversary."
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"But to me, it also goes to the idea that we now have not just information from Senator Grassley being complicit," added Weissmann. "We now have information, as you referred to, with respect to [Congressman] Perry being complicit. And these are the key people who enable what Donald Trump is doing. And it's sort of shocking that they're sitting members of Congress."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
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