Trump lobbied the Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt.”

We already knew that former President Donald Trump pressured Justice Department officials to follow his example by claiming that there was election fraud despite the lack of evidence. Now, new documents suggest the pressure may have been even worse than initially thought. In a December phone call with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, Trump had a simple response when told the Justice Department did not have the power to change the outcome of an election. “Just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and members of Congress R.,” Trump said on the call, according to Donoghue’s notes.

Trump said in another part of the call that “We have an obligation to tell people this was an illegal and corrupt election.” The appeal notes show how obsessed Trump was with the election results and focused on specific states where he said fraud had taken place. He was pushed back. “Most of the information you get is wrong,” Donoghue said. Trump continued to insist. “You might not be following the internet like I do,” Trump said at one point.

The notes were handed over to the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. While the December 27 phone call notes do not specify which lawmakers Trump had in mind that would aid his efforts, in other points of the call he mentioned Ohio Reps Jim Jordan. and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania as well as Senator Ron. Johnson of Wisconsin. The call was “perhaps the boldest moment in a months-long lobbying campaign to enlist the Justice Department in its crusade to overturn the election results,” notes The New York Times.

Democrats said the notes provided further evidence of how Trump tried to get a historically rather independent White House department to illegally engage in the political fight and strengthen his argument that the election was corrupt despite the lack of evidence. “These handwritten notes show that President Trump has directly called on our country’s main law enforcement agency to take action to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” said the President of the United Nations. House Oversight, Carolyn Maloney, in a statement. Trump issued a statement on Saturday denouncing the oversight committee for releasing the documents, calling it “corrupt and highly partisan.”

The notes from the conversation are “intriguing” and show why a full investigation into the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill is needed, writes Dan Balz of the Washington Post. He explains:

What did Trump mean when he said, “Leave the rest to me and the members of Congress R.” What did Trump have in mind, other than trying to bend Pence into acting beyond his constitutional authority and returning the vote count to the states, which Pence refused to do?

…

As with much of Trump’s presidency, much of what he did to attack the institutions of democracy after the election was there for everyone. The new information, however, is a reminder that not everything he did was done in plain sight. How many more are there?

The value of a full investigation of what happened before and including January 6 is to tell the big story. It’s a story that doesn’t start with the marauders who overwhelmed law enforcement on Capitol Hill. It starts long before and with Donald Trump. Without him and what he did to try to overthrow the election, it is unlikely that Capitol Hill would have needed to defend itself on January 6.