On New Year's Day 2021, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to the President of the United States, emailed a YouTube video to the Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen.

The video promoted a bizarre conspiracy theory known as Italy Gate, asserting that a tech employee at an Italian aerospace company had worked with the CIA to use US military satellites that flipped votes on election night for Donald Trump to Joe Biden.

There was to be sure not a shred of evidence to support this fantastical claim. Nevertheless, Meadows wanted Rosen to have the Department of Justice investigate the matter.

Rosen forwarded the YouTube video to his deputy, Richard Donnie, who responded with two words, pure insanity.

The exchange can be found in a new Senate Judiciary Committee report that documents held then President Trump in his top aides repeatedly pressured the Justice Department to take steps to block the rightful winner of last year's election from becoming President.

thereby allowing Trump the loser to stay in power. With the public ever learned the full extent of Trump's unprecedented steps to the war at American democracy. And how much will Trump's now well-documented efforts connect to the riot at the US Capitol on January 6th?

We'll talk to Norm Eisen, a former White House lawyer and special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee now with the Brookings Institute on this episode of Skull Duggery.

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I'm Michael Hizogov, Chief Investigator of Cross-Monet for Yahoo News.

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Okay, so when I read the passage in this new Senate Judiciary Committee report about the YouTube video, all I can think of was the time my then 11-year-old son, who spends

far too much time watching YouTube videos, came to me and showed me the video he had just watched asserting that Australia does not exist.

I think he kind of knew that this was bogus, but he did ask me about it and I took him to the globe and showed him, yeah, they are so Australia it exists.

Now, I think he came back with a question along the lines of, yeah, but how do we know that's real? Which kind of sums up the mindset of Trump world with these truly ridiculous conspiracy theories they had about the election.

And, you know, it's a pretty sorry state of affairs to imagine that at the highest levels of the US government, people were buying into it.

I think one of my favorite moments in the report that just came out is a moment in late December when Trump is pushing the Department of Justice regarding a variety of allegations about voter fraud when they respond, look, these really aren't credible.

Trump responds to them and complains, you guys aren't following the internet the way I do.

And I got to say that part of the report, the Italian aerospace dude working with the CIA to get satellites to change the voting machines or whatever actually reminded me of when I was a copy boy at the Washington Post when I was in college and answering phones on the city desk and there was a guy named Mr. T who used to call in with tips.

And he's always asked for woodward or Bernstein and Carl was long gone by that but Bob was still around, but I would say, well, Bob's not in today.

And he said, well, I got a really big story for him. I said, well, just give it to me and I'll pass it on. He said, okay, you ready for this? I said, yeah, I'm ready.

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