Testifying Thursday afternoon wereJeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general brought inafter Bill Barr resigned; Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time of the insurrection; and Steven Engel, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the time.
At the time that Rosen was brought in as attorney general, in December 2020, he said he faced pressure almost daily to uncover evidence thatJoe Bidenand Democrats had stolen the 2020 presidential election. Barr, after all, had just fallen from grace in Trump’s eyes afterpublicly statingthat the DOJ could not corroborate the president’s election fraud claims.
“Between Dec. 23 and Jan. 3, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day, with one or two exceptions,” Rosen testified. “The common element of all of [these meetings] was the president expressing his dissatisfaction that the Justice Department had not done enough to investigate election fraud.”
Rosen said that the Justice Department declined all of Trump’s requests of them to declare fraud, “because we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them.”
Donoghue echoed Rosen’s testimony, telling the House committee that Trump was fixated on verifying a few rumored instances of fraud in swing states.
Others in DOJ leadership, though, believed Clark’s lack of relevant experience and alleged willingness to “commit a felony” made him “completely incompetent” for the role, and that if he were to be named acting attorney general it would be a “murder-suicide pact” for the president and his team.
“When each of the president’s efforts failed he resorted to installing a new attorney general to say that the election was illegal and corrupt, simply so he could stay in power,” Kinzinger alleged on the panel.
Trump’s behind-the-scenes plan to swap Rosen with Clark came to a head on the evening of Jan. 3, 2021, when a heated Oval Office meeting nearly cost the “integrity of the Department of Justice,” Kinzinger said.
Donoghue recalled telling Trump: “You’re going to lose your entire department leadership [if you appoint Clark]. Every [assistant attorney general] will walk out of here.”
Ultimately, Trump decided not to replace Rosen — but his mission to stay in the White House wasn’t over. Three days after that Jan. 3 meeting, the House committee asserts, his mounting frustration had boiled over onto his supporters on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
source: people.com
