The Trump administration tries to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and its aftermath.
There is theatrical outrage in Washington, at least the parts of it that are still open, over the release by Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of a 2022 FBI memo that everyone had to know existed, setting forth a request for authority (by the FBI’s then-Director Chris Wray) and subsequent granting of same (by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-Deputy AG Lisa Monaco) for an investigation of the so-called fake electors scheme — as part of the January 6 probe everyone has known about for years. Not only has everyone long known that the “fake electors” investigation happened starting over three years ago (only after it was given significant spotlight by the House January 6 Committee a year before that); everyone has also long known that this investigation resulted in formal charges against President Trump — extensively detailed in the J6 indictment filed three years ago, and outlined with even greater elaboration in former Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith’s final report back in January.
The mock horror over the probe (codenamed “Arctic Frost”) was related to, and choreographed similarly to, the mock horror two weeks earlier, when the FBI “revealed” that, in the Biden years, the FBI had perused the phone records of a number of Republican senators and one GOP representative during a narrow four-day period (January 4-7, 2021) around the January 6 joint session of Congress, which the president was indicted for allegedly obstructing and which resulted in a riot at the Capitol. As I explained here, this was not news or indicative of “spying” on the lawmakers, though it has been stoked as scandal.
Following Senator Grassley’s non-bombshell bombshell, President Trump piled on with the usual Truth Social post, incoherently insisting it showed that people who were not in government at the time had somehow rigged the 2020 election.
The pattern is one we’ve seen since the start of the second Trump administration. It is a top priority of the president and his allies to peddle a revisionist 2020 history, in which we’re instructed that President Trump was charged with federal crimes based on no evidence of wrongdoing, as a result of which the cases against him were rejected by the courts.
Over the weekend, I did a series of three posts on this:
- The Trump Administration’s Revisionist 2020 History Project
- The Faux Freak-Out over “Arctic Frost”
- The State of the Federal Prosecutions of President Trump
We will see much more of this, so it’s important to recognize it for what it is. The public weighed the president’s very serious post-2020 election misconduct and, by a thin margin, elected him again in 2024 nevertheless. That should be reason enough to move on. Since that is not happening, and because the president is doubling down on lawfare rather than ending the destructive practice, it is important to be accurate about what happened.