A number of media outlets cite Donald Trump's behavior after his election defeat last November as an attempted “coup”.

The loser in the US presidential election spread lies about alleged “election fraud” and tried to convince Vice President Mike Pence and his ministers to undo the defeat.

Now the Judiciary Committee in the Senate published a detailed report on Trump's attempts not only to doubt the election result, but also to reverse it.

Accordingly, the then president is said to have asked the Ministry of Justice nine times to find ways to do this.

The loser in the election and his then chief of staff Mark Meadows are said to have repeatedly pressured a lawyer in the ministry to investigate unsubstantiated allegations of “election fraud”.

Trump also tried to sack then-incumbent Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen after the election and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, a ministerial official who supported the ousted president's conspiracy theories.

Pat Cipollone, until then a loyal legal advisor in the White House, is said to have threatened to resign in January 2021, according to the report.

"You don't follow it as closely as I do"

The report is based on interviews with former Justice Department employees whom Trump wanted to make vicarious agents of his lies at the time.

Trump's last attorney general, Rosen, also spoke to the senators.

Trump forwarded reports of alleged electoral fraud to the ministry and said: "You people don't follow this on the Internet as closely as I do." Rosen himself told the loser that the ministry could not simply reverse the election.

The elected president then demanded that the minister officially declare that the vote had been corrupted - then "leave the rest to me and the members of Congress," the report quoted him as saying.

Committee members state that Trump disregarded the democratic process and abused his power. The eight-month investigation once again demonstrated how serious the then president was in his attempts to reverse the election. Committee chairman, Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois, said the country had narrowly escaped a serious constitutional crisis.

Trump conjured up this crisis in three steps, Durbin said: First, he went to court.

When he failed there with his lies about “electoral fraud”, he tried to take control of the Ministry of Justice.

He also pressured state justice and interior ministers such as Brad Raffensperger in Georgia to investigate and not confirm the regional election results.

"The third step was to let go of the mob and rush into the Capitol where we counted the votes that day," Durbin told CNN of the January 6 attack on the Capitol when Congress barely won the election result had to confirm formal procedures followed.

Republicans publish alternative version

The Republicans meanwhile refuse to accept the Judiciary Committee's report. Senator Chuck Grassley, senior Republican on the panel, released an alternate version Thursday. It says that Trump always listened to his political advisers and employees. He did not try to use the Justice Department to reverse the election result. Trump was concerned because there were reports of “crimes” in connection with the election, the text says, which follows the loser and his supporters once again. Republicans also claim that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden influenced the investigation.

In the Chamber of Deputies, the special committee on the attack on the Capitol on January 6, among other things, deals with the question of how great Trump's influence was on his rampaging supporters. The former president announced that he wants to try to use his "executive privilege", i.e. his executive immunity privilege, in retrospect. This could hinder the investigation into the attack on the Capitol.

A Trump attorney reportedly wrote to several witnesses who had received summons from the investigative committee. Politico magazine reported that the letters spoke of Trump's intention to invoke executive privilege. The then Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller is said to have received such a letter, as did Trump's then Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. They were also asked not to cooperate with the House of Representatives investigation, according to the Washington Post newspaper.

The Democrat Pete Aguilar, who sits on the special committee, said in the evening that it was not Trump's right to invoke an executive privilege.

Conservative lawyers doubt this view and believe that Trump could do this for matters from his term in office.

A simpler way is more likely: those summoned can refuse to testify if they would incriminate themselves with information.