President Donald Trump is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, continuing to press an issue that resulted in an attack on the U.S. Capitol and his impeachment, but remains a central preoccupation.
“Biden was grossly incompetent, and the 2020 election was a total FRAUD! The evidence is MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING. A Special Prosecutor must be appointed,” Trump wrote on social media June 20.
Trump’s efforts to challenge his 2020 election loss to former President Joe Biden failed in court. Independent reviews and leading members of his own administration dismissed his fraud claims.
In 2022, eight conservative legal experts published a report called “Lost, Not Stolen,” reviewing the evidence in 64 different cases in six swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They found that Trump and his allies didn’t provide evidence of widespread election fraud. Trump lost every case but one.
Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said in early December 2020 that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
Yet Trump persisted, pressuring Congress to try and overturn the election results in a campaign that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021 when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump later was impeached and indicted by a grand jury for his actions in the election aftermath, but the Senate acquitted him on the impeachment charge and Special Counsel Jack Smith requested to dismiss the Jan. 6 charges against Trump after he won, which a judge approved.
Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 people charged with crimes related to Jan. 6 on his first day back in office.
Contributing: Erin Mansfield, Isabel Morales
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump wants prosecutor to investigate 2020 loss to Joe Biden
