Merrick Brian Garland is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as the 86th United States attorney general since 2021. He previously served as a circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1997 to 2021. In 2016,President Barack Obama nominated Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court,but the Republican-led U.S. Senate did not hold a vote to confirm him.
Kirkland &Ellis LLP is an American multinational law firm headquartered in Chicago,Illinois. Founded in 1909,Kirkland &Ellis is the largest law firm in the world by revenue and the seventh-largest by number of attorneys. It was the first law firm in the world to reach US$7 billion in annual revenue.
Scott Gordon Perry is an American politician and retired Army National Guard brigadier general who is the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania's 10th congressional district,serving since 2013. The district,numbered as Pennsylvania's 4th congressional district from 2013 to 2019,is centered around Harrisburg,York,and most of their inner suburbs in Dauphin,Cumberland and York counties. A member of the Republican Party,in November 2021 Perry was elected chairman of the House Freedom Caucus,the most conservative House Republican group,and served through 2023.
Steven Andrew Engel is an American lawyer. He served as the United States assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Trump administration. Engel,who previously worked in the George W. Bush administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel,was nominated by President Donald Trump on January 31,2017,and confirmed on November 7,2017.
Jeffrey Adam Rosen is an American lawyer who served as acting United States attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021 and as United States deputy attorney general from 2019 to 2020. Before joining the Department of Justice,he was a senior partner at the law firm Kirkland &Ellis and was the United States deputy secretary of transportation.
John Charles Demers is an Italian-born American lawyer who served as United States Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division (NSD) from 2018 to 2021. Following the resignation of Jeffrey A. Rosen,Demers also served as acting United States Attorney General for a few hours on January 20,2021 until President Joe Biden signed an executive order naming Monty Wilkinson as acting United States Attorney General later that day.
Pasquale Anthony "Pat" Cipollone is an American attorney who served as White House Counsel for President Donald Trump. While in office he defended Trump in his first impeachment trial. He objected to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,and played a key role in the January 6 committee hearings,specifically the committee's sixth hearing.
Eric Herschmann is an American political advisor and attorney who served as a senior advisor to former President Donald Trump.
This is a timeline of events from 2020 to 2022 related to investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections,both before and after July 2016,until November 8,2016,election day,the transition,the first and second halves of 2017,the first and second halves of 2018,and the first and second halves of 2019.
Richard Donoghue is an American attorney and prosecutor who served as the acting United States deputy attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021. Previously,he served as the principal associate deputy attorney general in 2020 and as United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 2018 to 2020. Donoghue was appointed interim U.S. Attorney by Jeff Sessions in January 2018.
After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election,Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election,with support from his campaign,proxies,political allies,and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack by Trump supporters in an attempted self-coup d'état. Trump and his allies used the "big lie" propaganda technique to promote false claims and conspiracy theories asserting the election was stolen by means of rigged voting machines,electoral fraud and an international conspiracy. Trump pressed Department of Justice leaders to challenge the results and publicly state the election was corrupt. However,the attorney general,director of National Intelligence,and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency –as well as some Trump campaign staff –dismissed these claims. State and federal judges,election officials,and state governors also determined the claims were baseless.
Italygate is a pro-Trump,QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory that alleges the 2020 United States presidential election was rigged to favor Joe Biden using satellites and military technology to remotely switch votes from Donald Trump to Biden from the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The conspiracy was also rumored to involve the Vatican. Fact-checkers at Reuters and USA Today,who investigated these claims,described them as "false" and "baseless".
The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives established to investigate the U.S. Capitol attack.
The Eastman memos,also known as the "coup memo",are documents by John Eastman,an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump,advancing the fringe legal theory that a U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified state electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome personally desired by the Vice President,such as a result in the Vice President's own party's favor,including retaining himself as Vice President,or if the Vice President is himself the presidential candidate,then to unilaterally make himself president.
The Jeffrey Clark letter was a draft letter that falsely claimed the Department of Justice had been investigating "various irregularities in the 2020 election."
The Trump fake electors plot was a significant part of attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election made by Donald Trump and his associates. After the results of the 2020 United States presidential election determined U.S. president Donald Trump had lost,a scheme was devised by him,his associates,and Republican Party officials in seven states to subvert the election by creating and submitting fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them,rather than the authentic certificates,and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman,detailed in the Eastman memos,which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process,thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By June 2024,dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement. The federal Smith special counsel investigation is investigating Trump's role in the events. Testimony has revealed that Trump was fully aware of the fake electors scheme,and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
The United States Justice Department investigation into attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election began in early 2021 with investigations and prosecutions of hundreds of individuals who participated in the January 6,2021 attack on the United States Capitol. By early 2022,the investigation had expanded to examine Donald Trump's inner circle,with the Justice Department impaneling several federal grand juries to investigate the attempts to overturn the election. Later in 2022,a special counsel was appointed. On August 1,2023,Trump was indicted. The indictment also describes six alleged co-conspirators.
The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump,et al. is a pending criminal case against Donald Trump,the 45th president of the United States,and 18 co-defendants. The prosecution alleges that Trump led a "criminal racketeering enterprise",in which he and all other defendants "knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome" of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Georgia. All defendants are charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute,which has a penalty of five to twenty years in prison. The indictment comes in the context of Trump's broader effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
