How stupid is Trump?

You believe Biden, who wouldn't know what day of the week it is, can be your leader.

WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump pressed top Justice Department officials late last year to declare that the election was corrupt even though they had found no instances of widespread fraud, so that he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results, according to new documents provided to lawmakers and obtained by The New York Times.

The demands were an extraordinary instance of a president interfering with an agency that is typically more independent from the White House to advance his personal agenda. They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign during his final weeks in office to delegitimize the election results.

The exchange unfolded during a phone call on Dec. 27 in which Mr. Trump pressed the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and his deputy, Richard P. Donoghue, on voter fraud claims that the department had disproved. Mr. Donoghue warned that the department had no power to change the outcome of the election. Mr. Trump replied that he did not expect that, according to notes Mr. Donoghue took memorializing the conversation.

“Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to congressional allies, Mr. Donoghue wrote in summarizing Mr. Trump’s response.

Mr. Trump did not name the lawmakers, but at other points during the call he mentioned Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom he described as a “fighter”; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who at the time promoted the idea that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump; and Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, whom Mr. Trump praised for “getting to bottom of things.”

The notes connect Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress with his campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to help undermine, or even nullify, the election results.

The lawmakers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Jordan ultimately voted to overturn the election results in key states, but has downplayed his role in the president’s pressure campaign. Mr. Perry continues to assert Mr. Trump won, but has not been tied directly to the White House effort to keep him in office. And Mr. Johnson, whom Mr. Trump recently endorsed as he weighs whether to seek a third term, maintains that it is reasonable to have questions about the integrity of the election, though he has recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.

The Justice Department provided Mr. Donoghue’s notes to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Trump administration’s efforts to unlawfully reverse the election results.

Typically, the department has fought to keep secret any accounts of private discussions between a president and his cabinet to avoid setting a precedent that would prevent officials in future administrations from candidly advising presidents out of concern that their conversations would later be made public.

But handing over the notes to Congress is part of a pattern of allowing scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The Biden Justice Department also told Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and other former officials this week that they could provide unrestricted testimony to investigators with the House Oversight and Reform and the Senate Judiciary Committees.

The department reasoned that congressional investigators were examining potential wrongdoing by a sitting president, an extraordinary circumstance, according to letters sent to the former officials. Because executive privilege is meant to benefit the country, rather than the president as an individual, invoking it over Mr. Trump’s efforts to push his personal agenda would be inappropriate, the department concluded.

“These handwritten notes show that President Trump directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election in the final days of his presidency,” Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, said in a statement.

Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue reflected his single-minded focus on overturning the election results. At one point, Mr. Trump alleged voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, which he called “corrupted elections.” Mr. Donoghue pushed back.

“Much of the info you’re getting is false,” Mr. Donoghue said, adding that the department had conducted “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews” and not found evidence to support his claims. “We look at allegations but they don’t pan out,” the officials told Mr. Trump, according to the notes.

The department found that the error rate of ballot counting in Michigan was 0.0063 percent, not the 68 percent that the president asserted; it did not find evidence of a conspiracy theory that an employee in Pennsylvania had tampered with ballots; and after examining video and interviewing witnesses, it did not find evidence of ballot fraud in Fulton County, Ga., according to the notes.

Mr. Trump, undeterred, brushed off the department’s findings. “Ok fine — but what about the others?” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes describing the president’s remarks. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Donoghue to travel to Fulton County to verify signatures on ballots.

The people “saying that the election isn’t corrupt are corrupt,” Mr. Trump told the officials, adding that they needed to act. “Not much time left.”

At another point, Mr. Donoghue said that the department could quickly verify or disprove the assertion that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there are voters.

“Should be able to check on that quickly, but understand that the DOJ can’t and won’t snap it’s fingers and change the outcome of the election, doesn’t work that way,” Mr. Donoghue wrote in his notes.

The officials also told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no evidence to support a lawsuit regarding the election results. “We are not in a position based on the evidence. We can only act on the actual evidence developed,” they said.

Mr. Trump castigated the officials, saying that “thousands of people called” their local U.S. attorney’s offices to complain about the election and that “nobody trusts the F.B.I.” He said that “people are angry — blaming D.O.J. for inaction.”

“You guys may not be following the internet the way I do,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document.

In a moment of foreshadowing, Mr. Trump said, “people tell me Jeff Clark is great, I should put him in,” referring to the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, who had also encouraged department officials to intervene in the election. “People want me to replace D.O.J. leadership.”

“You should have the leadership you want,” Mr. Donoghue replied. But it “won’t change the dept’s position.”

Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Rosen did not know that Mr. Perry had introduced Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump. Exactly one week later, they would be forced to fight Mr. Clark for their jobs in an Oval Office showdown.

During the call, Mr. Trump also told the Justice Department officials to “figure out what to do” with Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son. “People will criticize the D.O.J. if he’s not investigated for real,” he told them, violating longstanding guidelines against the White House interfering in criminal investigations or other law enforcement actions.

Two days after the phone call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Donoghue took notes of a meeting between Justice Department officials: Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows; the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone; and White House deputy counsel Patrick Philbin met to discuss a conspiracy theory known as Italygate, which asserts without evidence that people in Italy used military technology to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States.

The Justice Department officials told the White House that they had assigned someone to look into the matter, according to the notes and a person briefed on the meeting. They did not mention that the department was looking into the theory in order to debunk it, the person said.

The global campaign group Avaaz has been allowed to take legal action over the Scottish government’s refusal to investigate the source of Donald Trump’s wealth.

A Scottish judge has granted Avaaz permission to challenge a decision by ministers to reject calls for an unexplained wealth order (UWO) into how Trump raised the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on his two Scottish golf courses near Aberdeen and Turnberry.

Known as “McMafia orders”, they give Scottish prosecutors and courts the legal power to investigate how people, such as senior figures in organised crime, came by the money used to buy homes, cars, yachts and other assets.

The court’s decision is the latest blow for Trump and his family, who are under numerous investigations by prosecutors in the US over the former president’s tax affairs and finances.

The Trump Organization robustly rejects allegations that the former president used unlawful sources to finance his golf courses in Scotland; his son Eric Trump has said the family used its own money to do so.

Attention has focused on whether Trump borrowed the money from Deutsche Bank, or from unknown overseas backers, including Russian sources. So far, there has been no proof of any illicit funding of Trump’s businesses.

Avaaz, a crowd-sourced campaign group, took the case after Scottish ministers rejected calls from Patrick Harvie, the Scottish Greens co-leader, and other MSPs for an investigation into how Trump bought and funded both courses.

Humza Yousaf, the then justice secretary, told Harvie that a decision to pursue a UWO was solely a matter for the lord advocate, Scotland’s chief prosecutor, whose decisions had to be “free of political interference”.

After Harvie challenged that, the government admitted that ministers had the responsibility to request a McMafia order investigation. Even so, the Scottish National party and Conservatives rejected a Holyrood motion from the Greens, backed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, calling for one earlier this year by 89 to 32 votes.

Before the vote, Eric Trump said: “Patrick Harvie is nothing more than a national embarrassment with his pathetic antics that only serve himself and his political agenda.”

In a ruling issued on Wednesday by the court of session, Scotland’s civil court, Lord Sandison said he believed the Avaaz case “had real prospects of success [and that] there was a sensible legal argument to be had on the matters raised by the petition”.

Nick Flynn, the legal director at Avaaz, said: “Armed with a proper understanding of the law, we hope ministers agree that Trump’s purchase demands the transparency that only a UWO can bring. Scotland’s reputation for upholding the rule of law and combating money laundering depends on it.”

Harvie said: “I’m glad we are a step forward in getting some clarity over why Trump’s business dealings in Scotland haven’t been investigated. It should never have got to the stage of a legal challenge from an NGO for the Scottish government to confirm or deny whether they will seek a McMafia order.”

Trump’s critics believe there are significance questions about how he financed the original purchase of both Menie, north of Aberdeen, in 2008, and the conversion of what was then a small coastal country estate into an 18-hole championship golf course with boutique hotel.

That was followed by Trump’s purchase of the far larger Turnberry golf resort and its five-star hotel in 2014.

Trump spent tens of millions of pounds upgrading the hotel, adding a new ballroom, then redesigned both Turnberry’s golf courses. Overall, the Trump project is estimated to have cost in excess of £120m.

Recent accounts show the Turnberry business owes Trump £114m, and the Aberdeenshire estate £44m.

Sandison allowed the Avaaz application to proceed even though it was technically time-barred, and also decided a future judicial review could investigate Trump’s finances, not just the dry technical question of whether ministers can order a UWO inquiry.

After rejecting the government’s protests that the petition was filed too late, the judge ruled there were clear matters of public importance raised by the Avaaz case.

“The question comes to be whether the petition raises matters of such live and substantive public importance as to render it in the interests of justice to allow it to proceed out of time,” Sandison said.

Gee, I guess it's sayonara for Joe and Kamala: