Ex-AG says Trump ‘persistent’ in effort to discredit election

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump’s last attorney general has told U.S. senators his boss was “persistent” in trying to pressure the Justice Department to discredit the results of the 2020 election.

In private testimony Saturday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeffrey Rosen said that he had to “persuade the president not to pursue a different path” at a high-stakes January meeting in which Trump considered ousting Rosen as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement officer.

According to a person familiar with the testimony, Rosen’s opening statement also characterized as “inexplicable” the actions of his Justice Department colleague, Jeffrey Clark, who was willing to push Trump’s false claims of election fraud and whom Trump considered installing as acting attorney general to replace Rosen.

The testimony — portions of which were previously reported by The New York Times — is part of a trough of information that congressional investigators are assembling about Trump’s frantic efforts to reverse his defeat by President Joe Biden and use the Justice Department to stay in office.

Trump’s actions also are being investigated by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. The Justice Department’s inspector general is separately examining whether any current or former agency officials acted improperly to invalidate election results — an effort that could result in recommended disciplinary actions or, if the office finds potential crimes were committed, referrals to the department for prosecution.

The congressional inquiries got a boost last month when the White House and the Justice Department cleared the way for Rosen and other former officials to discuss their election-related conversations with the president, saying the Biden administration would not seek to silence them by invoking executive privilege.

Two weeks ago, Congress obtained and released handwritten notes from Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, who participated in phone calls with Trump and Rosen in which the president urged them to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. Donoghue’s notes describe Trump telling him and Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and Republican lawmakers. They also describe Rosen and Donoghue saying claims of election fraud did not appear to have merit.

Rosen appeared Saturday before the Senate committee to deliver his account directly. Donoghue testified as well.

“The president was persistent with his inquiries, and I would have strongly preferred that he had chosen a different focus in the last month of his presidency,” Rosen said in his opening statement, according to a person familiar with the testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private session. “But as to the actual issues put to the Justice Department, DOJ consistently acted with integrity, and the rule of law held fast.”

Rosen said he thought Trump’s claims about voting irregularities were “misguided, and I disagreed with things that President Trump suggested the Justice Department do with regard to the election. So we did not do them.”

He stressed that when Trump was told he was “misinformed or wrong, or that we would not take various actions to discredit the election’s validity, he acquiesced to the department’s position.”

Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Trump, said in a statement Wednesday night: “We don’t need selective, partisan leaks from closed door testimony to know that President Donald J. Trump rightfully voiced his belief that America deserved a complete investigation into the 2020 election. He has been doing exactly that publicly since Election Day.”