It’s easy to get numbed to all of this, but we need to take a moment to absorb both the details and the implications of this extraordinary interim report by the Senate Judiciary Committee: “How the Former President and His Allies Pressured the DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election.”
If you have any lingering doubt that we are, indeed, in the midst of a rolling constitutional crisis, you need to read the whole thing.
The interim report, released on Thursday, describes how Justice Department officials scrambled to stave off the pressure during a period when Mr. Trump was getting advice about blocking certification of the election from a lawyer he had first seen on television, and the president’s actions were so unsettling that his top general and the House speaker discussed the nuclear chain of command…
“This report shows the American people just how close we came to a constitutional crisis,” Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “Thanks to a number of upstanding Americans in the Department of Justice, Donald Trump was unable to bend the department to his will. But it was not due to a lack of effort.”
Mr. Durbin said that he believes the former president, who remains a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, would have “shredded the Constitution to stay in power.”
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The nagging question here is: Does this break any laws? And can anything be done?
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