Trump justice agency turmoil told
Report details threat of resignations over president’s plan
WASHINGTON — A Senate report on President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election offers new details about an Oval Office confron- tation between Trump and the Justice Department, revealing the extent to which government lawyers threatened to resign en masse if the president removed his attorney general.
The interim report by the Senate Judiciary Committee was issued Thursday. While Republicans on the panel offered their counter-findings, arguing that Trump did not subvert the justice system to remain in power, the majority report by the Democrats offers the most detailed account to date of the struggle inside the administration’s final days.
Democrats say Trump nearly provoked a constitutional crisis, but for the steady hands of senior Justice Department officials; Republicans say Trump was “faithful” to his sworn duty as president in seeking assurances about voter integrity.
Both parties are bracing for larger fights over a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Just three days before that melee, then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a few other administration officials met in the Oval Office for a confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s claims of mass voter fraud.
According to testimony Rosen gave to the committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.”
For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it.
During the meeting, Donoghue and another Justice Department official made clear that all of the Justice Department’s assistant attorneys general “would resign if Trump replaced Rosen with Clark,” the report states. “Donoghue added that the mass resignations likely would not end there, and that U.S. Attorneys and other DOJ officials might also resign en masse.”
The details of the report were first reported by The New York Times.
A key issue in the meeting was a letter that Clark and Trump wanted the Justice Department to send to Georgia officials warning of “irregularities” in voting and suggesting the state Legislature get involved in questioning the election results. Clark thought the letter should also be sent to officials in other states where Trump supporters were contesting winning Biden vote totals, the report states.
Rosen and Donoghue had refused to send such a letter. According to the report, the president thought that if he installed Clark as the new attorney general, the letter would go out, fueling his bid to toss out Biden victories in a handful of states.
The Senate report says opposition to the idea came not only from the Justice Department but from the top White House lawyer, Pat Cipollone, who made clear that he and his deputy also would quit if Trump went through with his plan.
At one point in the meeting, Cipollone called Clark’s letter a “murder-suicide pact,” for the chain reaction it would be likely to set off inside the government, the report states.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the committee’s chairman, told reporters Trump’s attempt to “take over” the Justice Department was “stopped by a handful of people who stood up for principle and against Trump’s strategy.”
“And then three days later, in desperation, Donald Trump turned the mob loose on this Capitol,” the senator said. “It was a desperate strategy by a desperate man.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in an emailed statement that the committee’s interviews show “Jeffrey Rosen conducted himself honorably and the Department of Justice operated as it is designed to.”
The counter-report by committee Republicans that was released Thursday emphasized that Trump ultimately backed away from the plan to replace Rosen with Clark and issue Clark’s letter.
Separately, Trump is instructing four top former aides to defy subpoenas to turn over records and testify to a select congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The former aides — White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino, Defense Department official Kashyap Patel, and adviser Steve Bannon — faced a Thursday deadline to comply with the subpoenas. Any refusal would set up a potential legal battle with the House committee.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson and others on the panel have said previously that the committee might recommend criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for those who refuse to cooperate.