CNN Details ‘Unhinged’ Claim by Trump DOJ Official Who Reportedly Suggested China Changed Votes Through… a ‘Thermostat’

You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.

According to CNN, Jeffrey Clark, the acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division at Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, told senior officials at the department he knew of information indicating China had used a “smart thermostat” to change vote tallies in the 2020 presidential election.

CNN’s Evan Perez, who was one of the reporters who broke the story, said that the episode “gives you a sense of how unhinged some of these theories had gotten inside the Justice Department.”

Based on this and other reporting, Clark appears to have led an effort in the weeks after the election to convince officials in the DOJ and elsewhere that the administration should take steps to overturn, or at least cast doubt on Joe Biden’s victory.

In an attempt to quell any doubts about the election, then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen granted a request from Clark seeking a briefing from Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.

In his request, Clark wrote in an email to Rosen and Deputy AG Richard Donoghue, “I would like to have your authorization to get a classified briefing tomorrow from ODNI led by DNI Radcliffe on foreign election interference issues.”

Clark claimed that “hackers have evidence (in the public domain) that a Dominion machine accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China. ODNI may have additional classified evidence.”

The baffling claim about thermostats was first reported by ABC News earlier this week.

Ratcliffe, who’d been a vociferous supporter of Trump’s in Congress when the president appointed him to the post, briefed Clark in late December and said his department had no evidence showing that foreign interference changed any vote tallies. Clark was skeptical during the meeting, according to the report, and suggested some intelligence officials within the agency were withholding information.

Clark’s name was just in the news on Wednesday for an equally ridiculous reason, namely, in December he drafted a letter addressed to top elected officials in Georgia, urging Gov. Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to investigate “irregularities” in its presidential election. And even though only the governor can convene special sessions, Clark made the extremely dubious claim that the Georgia state legislature has the authority to call itself into session because of its alleged “implied authority under the Constitution of the United States.”

The letter was never sent.

Watch above via CNN.