Ex-DOJ officials say Trump pressured them to intervene in election
Former President Trump nearly replaced the head of the Department of Justice with a supporter of his fraud theories when the acting attorney general refused to comply with his demands to falsely claim there was evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, the House panel investigating the Capitol insurrection detailed in its hearing Thursday.
The committee also revealed that multiple Republican members of Congress asked for presidential pardons from Trump in the days after
Jan. 6, 2021, including Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor
Greene of Georgia.
The committee argued that a declaration from Justice Department officials that fraud had taken place in the election would have cast doubt on the results and given GOP-controlled state legislatures a pretense for appointing alternate presidential electors to reverse President Biden’s victory.
“Donald Trump didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate. He wanted the Justice Department to help legitimize his lies, to baselessly call the election corrupt, to appoint a special counsel to investigate alleged election fraud,” said Chairman Bennie Thompson (DMiss.).
Former acting Atty. Gen. Jeffrey A. Rosen, former acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Richard Donoghue and former Asst. Atty. Gen. for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel testified before the committee that had Trump asked the Justice Department in December to file legal briefs supporting election lawsuits brought by his campaign and allies. Testimony also detailed Trump’s request that Rosen appoint a special counsel to investigate election fraud, though Justice Department investigations had concluded there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that would change the election’s outcome.
“Between Dec. 23 [2020] and Jan. 3 [2021], the president either called me or met with me virtually every day,” Rosen said. “The Justice Department declined all of those requests because we did not think they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them.”
The panel also discussed a push by the former president to have the Justice Department challenge election results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Supreme Court. Engel and the Office of Legal Counsel ruled there was no legal basis to bring such a lawsuit.
The committee focused on a handful of meetings in late December 2020 and early January 2021 in which Trump considered replacing Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, at the prompting of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), including a Dec. 27 phone call in which Trump told
Rosen and Donoghue to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” according to notes Donoghue took from the conversation.
Donoghue said that the Dec. 27 conversation was “an escalation” of the pressure Trump had been putting on the department to intervene. Donoghue said he tried to be extremely blunt with Trump and tell him the department had investigated and there was nothing to any of the claims he was repeating because he saw there were many voices whispering in Trump’s ear.
“As we got later in the month of December, the president’s entreaties became more urgent. He became more adamant that we weren’t doing our job,” Donoghue said.
Federal agents searched Clark’s Virginia home Wednesday. More than a dozen law enforcement officers seized Clark’s electronic devices as part of their search, according to his current boss, Russ Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump.
The panel also discussed a draft letter Clark circulated by email on Dec. 28, 2020, in which the Justice Department would urge the Georgia Legislature to hold a special session to scrutinize supposed “irregularities”
in the state vote. The letter amounted to a road map for how Georgia could overturn its election results, suggesting the Legislature could ultimately choose a new slate of electors who would back Trump over Biden. Clark’s email indicates similar letters would be sent to officials in other states outlining allegations of fraud. Rosen and Donoghue refused.
The committee also for the first time provided evidence of its allegation in the first hearing that multiple Republican members of Congress had asked Trump for pardons after Jan. 6, including an email from Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks to the White House five days after the attack on the Capitol, asking for a pardon for himself and all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election.
The panel also showed parts of video depositions from White House staff who said that Gaetz, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas and
Scott Perry of Pennsylvania had asked Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for pardons, and that Greene had asked the White House counsel’s office for one.
Thursday’s hearing is expected to be the last for a few weeks. The committee will pause hearings for at least two weeks to examine new evidence it has obtained, Thompson said.