Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol/Chapter 4/Section 4.10
4.10 DECEMBER 29TH MEETING
The next day, Rosen, Donoghue, and Engel had a meeting with Mark Meadows, Pat Cipollone, and Cipollone's deputy, Pat Philbin, in the White House Chief of Staff's office.[222] While the meeting dealt primarily with the Presidential transition, the group discussed a draft civil complaint modeled after Texas v. Pennsylvania that the President wanted the Department of Justice to file challenging the results of the Presidential election, tentatively called United States v. Pennsylvania.[223] The DOJ officials said that they had not had time to thoroughly review the proposed suit, but initially indicated that it appeared to be flawed and did not seem "viable" for DOJ to file.[224] Meadows suggested that the DOJ leadership meet with William Olson and Kurt Olsen, the two attorneys affiliated with the Trump Campaign that had been working on the proposed suit, and added that Eastman and a retired judge from North Carolina named Mark Martin both had views about the lawsuit.[225]
In this meeting, Meadows also raised a new and outrageous allegation of election fraud: that an Italian company had been involved in changing votes in the Presidential election.[226] According to Meadows, there was a man, whom Donoghue later learned was in an Italian prison, who claimed to have information supporting the allegation and that CIA officers stationed in Rome were either aware of the plot to interfere in the election or had participated in it.[227] Donoghue described how it was apparent that Meadows was not clear on the specifics of the allegation but passed them along to DOJ to investigate, nonetheless.[228] Following the meeting Donoghue provided the information to the FBI, which quickly determined that the allegations were not credible.[229] Meadows and other senior officials in the Trump administration, however, pressed DOJ to investigate every allegation of fraud regardless of how absurd or specious.
In the days after the December 29th meeting with Meadows, the senior DOJ officials more closely examined the proposed United States v. Pennsylvania lawsuit and determined that DOJ could not file it.[230] Engel was principally tasked with examining the veracity of the suit and summarized his analysis in a series of talking points that he provided to Donoghue on December 31st.[231] Engel concluded that for multiple reasons, the proposed lawsuit lacked merit. First, the U.S. Government did not have standing to challenge how a State administered its election.[232] Such a challenge could only be brought by President Trump as a candidate and his campaign, or, possibly, an aggrieved electoral college elector.[233] Second, there was no identified precedent in the history of the Supreme Court establishing that such a lawsuit could be filed by the U.S. Government.[234] Third, by late December, States had already certified the results of their elections and the electoral college had met, so suing States by this point would not impact the results of the election.[235] Finally, unlike Texas v. Pennsylvania, which was one State suing another State, this lawsuit would not automatically be heard by the Supreme Court, so it should have been filed in a Federal district court months prior—if at all—to have any possibility of impacting the outcome of the election.[236]
When asked about it during his interview with the Select Committee, Engel described United States v. Pennsylvania as "a meritless lawsuit" and said, "there was never a question" about whether "the Department was going to file" it.[237] As senior DOJ officials had already explained to President Trump multiple times in November and December 2020, the Department of Justice was strictly limited in what election-related actions it could 
take. It could not oversee States' actions in administering their elections, and it could not support litigation filed by President Trump's campaign.[238] Nonetheless, President Trump continued to push DOJ to file this lawsuit over the following days and essentially act as an arm of his political campaign.