From the Conservative Brief: "A top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee says a preliminary investigation does not show that then-President Donald Trump was the mastermind of a “scheme” to get his Justice Department to work on overturning the results of the 2020 election.
Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the committee, told Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, that according to an interim report released by the panel last week regarding allegations involving the former president, so far nothing has been found to indicate any nefarious plots directed by Trump."
"It describes how Trump considered ousting then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with then-acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, who promised to pursue his baseless voter fraud claim. Rosen and his team refused to support the scheme and Trump's White House Counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to quit early January, according to the report.
"We have a very complete picture of the extent to which Trump was personally involved in this," Whitehouse said of the eight-month investigation.
"This is a question in which you can actually connect the president of the United States to the scheme.""The second thing that we know is that it focused very heavily on Georgia. So, that relates and feathers into the Georgia prosecution that's underway, I should say the investigation that's underway, down in Fulton County," he added."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/georgia-ripe-area-for-new-doj-probe-on-trump-effort-to-overturn-election-sen-whitehouse/ar-AAPlvFs (bold added)
This Washington Examiner piece appears to be specifically what WmLambert is citing and distorting:
"Whitehouse told host Chuck Todd that investigators have "a very complete picture of the extent to which Trump was personally involved in this," and he noted Trump's overtures to Georgia officials about the election results is the focus of a separate investigation looking into whether the former president and his allies broke state laws.
But the Rhode Island Democrat said the question of who actually masterminded the DOJ "scheme" remains unclear, and he pondered how it was funded.
"What we don't know is who was really behind this," Whitehouse said. "The text of the transcript and the body English of the witnesses suggests that they had very little regard for this character Jeffrey Clark, who was nominally going to be the new attorney general. They doubted his qualifications to even have that role."
"So, it's a possibility, I suppose, that he [Trump] saw this moment and grabbed it, but it's an equally real possibility that he was a cog in a larger machine, and we've got a lot of work to do to figure out how that machine ran through this period, who was behind it, where the money came from, and what's been going on," [Whitehouse] added.
Todd pressed this point, asking, "And you think it's somebody other than Donald Trump? I mean — you know, when I hear that, you're essentially saying you believe there's somebody else involved, somebody else was pulling the strings. Who could that be besides Donald Trump?""
https://news.yahoo.com/whitehouse-admits-trump-may-not-010600474.html (posting article by Washington Examiner)