The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is an office in the United States Department of Justice that assists the Attorney General's position as legal adviser to the President and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the Attorney General and provides its own written opinions and other advice in response to requests from the Counsel to the President,the various agencies of the Executive Branch,and other components of the Department of Justice. The Office reviews and comments on the constitutionality of pending legislation. The office reviews any executive orders and substantive proclamations for legality if the President proposes them. All proposed orders of the Attorney General and regulations that require the Attorney General's approval are reviewed. It also performs a variety of special assignments referred by the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General.
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,and was the first law firm in the world to reach US$4 billion in annual revenue.
William Pelham Barr is an American attorney who served as the United States attorney general in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and again in the administration of President Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020.
Scott Gordon Perry is an American far-right politician and retired U.S. Army National Guard brigadier general who is the U.S. representative for Pennsylvania's 10th congressional district. His district,numbered the 4th district from 2013 to 2019,includes Harrisburg,York,and most of the inner suburbs. Perry serves on the House Transportation,Infrastructure,and Foreign Affairs committees.
Rod Jay Rosenstein is an American attorney who served as the 37th United States deputy attorney general from April 2017 until May 2019. Prior to his appointment,he served as a United States attorney for the District of Maryland. At the time of his confirmation as deputy attorney general in April 2017,he was the longest-serving U.S. attorney. Rosenstein had also been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2007,but his nomination was never considered by the U.S. Senate.
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 the acting United States attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021 and as the 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.
The Robert Mueller special counsel investigation was an investigation into 45th U.S. president Donald Trump regarding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and was conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller from May 2017 to March 2019. It was also called the Russia investigation,Mueller probe,and Mueller investigation. The investigation focused on three points:
- Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
- Trump associates and their connection to Russian officials and espionage
- Possible obstruction of justice by Trump and his associates
Jeffrey Bossert Clark is an American lawyer who was Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division from 2018 to 2021. In September 2020,he was also appointed acting head of the Civil Division. In 2020 and 2021,Clark allegedly helped then-president Donald Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Clark's actions in that endeavor were reviewed by the District of Columbia Bar –the entity authorized by law to pursue attorney discipline and disbarment in the District of Columbia –which recommended discipline to the DC Court of Appeals in July 2022. He was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal prosecution of Donald Trump over attempts to overturn the 2020 election. On August 14,2023,he was indicted along with 18 other people in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia.
John Charles Demers is an American lawyer who served as the 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 the acting United States Attorney General on January 20,2021,until President Joe Biden named Monty Wilkinson to the position later that day.
Geoffrey Steven Berman is an American attorney who served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2018 to 2020. He is a partner at the law firm Fried,Frank,Harris,Shriver &Jacobson.
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.
The Barr letter is a four-page letter sent on March 24,2019,from Attorney General William Barr to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees purportedly detailing the "principal conclusions" of the Mueller report of the Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 United States presidential election,allegations of conspiracy or coordination between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia,and allegations of obstruction of justice.
Seth D. DuCharme is an American attorney who served as the acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. DuCharme was appointed by Attorney General William Barr and sworn in on July 10,2020,succeeding Richard Donoghue,who left his role to serve as principal associate deputy attorney general to Jeffrey A. Rosen.
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 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."
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 April 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.
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