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Trump pressured DOJ, panel told
Testimony: GOP lawmakers sought pardons after riot
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump hounded the Justice Department to pursue his false election fraud claims, striving in vain to enlist top law enforcement officials in his desperate bid to stay in power and hosting a dramatic Oval Office showdown in which he weighed replacing the agency’s leader with a more compliant lower-level official, according to testimony Thursday to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot.
Three Trump-era Justice Department officials recounted relentless pressure from the president, including multiple directives to chase unsupported allegations that the election won by Democrat Joe Biden had been stolen. The officials said they swatted away each demand because there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
“For the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think would have had grave consequences for the country that very well may have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis,” said Richard Donoghue, the acting No. 2 official in the final days of the Trump administration.
Another witness, Jeffrey Rosen, who was acting attorney general, said he was called by Trump or met with him basically every day starting in late December 2020 through early January 2021, with the common theme being “dissatisfaction about what the Justice Department had done to investigate election fraud.”
It all added up to a “brazen attempt” to use the Justice Department for his own political gain, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and co-chairman of the Jan. 6 committee.
“Donald Trump didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate,” Thompson said. “He wanted the Justice Department to help legitimize his lies.”
The panel also played recorded interviews of Trump aides saying multiple Republican members of Congress requested pardons.
Five days after the attack, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., sent an email with the subject line “Pardons” to the White House requesting a pardon for himself, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and “every congressman or senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania.”
Others seeking pardons, according to testimony Thursday, included GOP Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
Testimony also centered on an Oval Office showdown in which Trump contemplated replacing Rosen with a lower-level official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to champion Trump’s bogus fraud claims. Donoghue and another senior Justice Department official, Steven Engel, warned of mass resignations if Trump followed through. Only then did Trump relent.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., derided Clark as a lawyer whose sole qualification was doing “whatever the president wanted him to do, including overthrowing a free and fair democratic election.”
Shortly before the hearing, it was revealed that federal agents this week searched Clark’s Virginia home, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The panel’s hearing was the fifth this month by the House committee investigating the run-up to the insurrection at the Capitol. The committee last week presented videotaped depositions of former Attorney General William Barr, who castigated Trump’s fraud claims and later resigned. Thursday’s hearing focused on what happened after Rosen took over.
In one phone conversation, according to handwritten notes taken by Donoghue and highlighted Thursday, Trump directed to Rosen to “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen.”
Around that time, Trump was introduced by Perry to Clark, head of the DOJ’s civil division. Clark has been subpoenaed but was not among the witnesses Thursday.
Clark, according to statements from other DOJ officials, met with Trump despite being ordered not to by bosses at the department and presented himself as eager to aid the president’s efforts to challenge the election results.
The situation came to a head on Jan. 3, 2021, a Sunday, when Clark informed Rosen in a private meeting at the Justice Department that Trump wanted to replace him with Clark as acting attorney general. Rosen, resisting the idea of being fired by a subordinate, said Thursday that he contacted senior Justice Department officials to rally them together and also requested a White House meeting.
That night, Rosen, Donoghue and Engel, along with Clark, met Trump and top White House lawyers in the Oval Office.
Donoghue and Engel made clear to Trump that they and large numbers of other Justice Department officials would resign if Trump fired Rosen. White House lawyers said the same. Pat Cipollone, then the White House counsel, said the letter that Clark wanted to send was a “murder-suicide pact.”