It displayed an email from Congressman Mo Brooks in which the Alabama Republican asked the White House to consider a presidential pardon for himself and other congressional allies. The panel also revealed that several of Trump’s allies in Congress had requested pardons from the president in the days after the deadly assault on the Capitol. He explained that only Trump could fire him. Before they left, Donoghue said Trump asked him what would happen to Clark. Their warnings were ultimately persuasive and Trump relented. “It was very strongly worded to the president that that would happen,” Donoghue said. Donoghue said Engel told the president Clark would be “leading a graveyard”. He and Engel walked Trump through the implications of such a dramatic shift, warning him that there would be mass resignations among senior officials. “What have I got to lose?” Donoghue recalled Trump saying. That night, Rosen, Donoghue and Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel, who also testified on Thursday, gathered in the Oval Office with Trump and top White House lawyers for a tense, hours-long meeting.ĭonoghue said Trump appeared ready to follow through with the plan to replace Rosen with someone who promised fealty. Rosen, refusing to be fired by a subordinate, demanded a White House meeting. White House call logs from that afternoon showed that the White House staff was already referring to Clark as the “acting attorney general”, the committee showed. Tensions erupted on 3 January, when Clark told Rosen that Trump intended to replace him as the head of the department. Using expletives, he said he told Clark: “Congratulations, you just admitted your first step or act you’d take as attorney general would be committing a felony.” In a videotaped deposition, Eric Herschmann, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, said Clark’s plan to subvert the 2020 election was “asinine”. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/AFP/Getty Imagesĭonoghue said the letter was so “extreme” and baseless he had to read it twice to grasp the gravity of what was being suggested. Steven Engel, left, Jeff Rosen and Richard Donoghue testify during the Thursday’s hearing. He sent the letter to Rosen and Donoghue for their signature. “He would do whatever the president wanted him to do, including overthrowing a free and fair democratic election.”Ĭlark’s audacious effort to bend the department to Trump’s will included a draft letter addressed to state officials in Georgia falsely asserting that the department had evidence of voter fraud and suggesting the state withdraw its certification of Biden’s victory in the state. “What was his only qualification?” Congressman Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican and member of the committee who led the questioning, asked rhetorically. At the urging of Republican congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Trump contemplated replacing Rosen with Clark, an environmental lawyer by trade. “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the Congressmen.”Īt the center of Thursday’s hearing was Jeff Clark, a department official who embraced Trump’s myth of a stolen election. “I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump snapped back, according to Donoghue, whose handwritten notes of the exchange were displayed on a large screen during the hearing. In one of the near-daily conversations Trump had with the agency’s leader, Rosen told the president that the Department of Justice “can’t and won’t snap his fingers and change the outcome of an election”. “He wanted the justice department to help legitimize his lies, to basically call the election corrupt.” “Donald Trump didn’t just want the justice department to investigate,” Thompson said. After exhausting his legal options and being rebuffed by state and local elections officials, the panel said a desperate Trump turned to the justice department to falsely declare the election corrupt. Opening the hearing, the panel’s chair, Congressman Bennie Thompson, said Trump knew that the allegations of voter fraud were false, but nevertheless pressured the department to declare the election results tainted. In a breach of longstanding guidelines meant to guard the agency’s independence, Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting attorney general told the committee Trump contacted him “virtually every day” to complain that he had not done enough to investigate voter fraud in the election. An exhibit displayed during the January 6 hearing shows the Oval Office meeting on 3 January with Donald Trump.
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