Donald Trump persecuted the U.S. Department of Justice for continuing his false allegations of election fraud, contacting the agency leader “virtually every day” and trying in vain to recruit top officials. of order in a desperate attempt to stay in power, according to testimony Thursday in the House. panel investigating the January 6, 2021 riot on Capitol Hill.
Three Trump-era Justice Department officials testified that Trump was obsessed with election fraud claims and insisted they were being prosecuted even though they were repeatedly told none of the charges had any merit.
“I had this arsenal of allegations,” said Richard Donoghue, a senior Justice official. “I went over them piece by piece to say no, they weren’t true.”
Another witness, Jeffrey Rosen, the attorney general in office in the last days of the Trump administration, said he called him or met with him virtually every day from the time he rose to office in late December 2020. The common theme said. , was “dissatisfaction with what the Justice Department had done to investigate election fraud.”
The hearing drew attention to a memorably turbulent stretch in the department, as Trump in his last days in office tried to bend his will to a law enforcement agency that has long estimated its independence from the White House. The testimony was intended to show how Trump not only relied on outside advisers to pressure his allegations of election fraud, but also tried to harness the powers of federal executive branch agencies.
Clark’s house was searched
Trump’s scheme was a “blatant attempt” to use the Justice Department for his own political benefit, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and committee chairman.
Trump “didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate,” Thompson said. “He wanted the Justice Department to help legitimize his lies, basically labeling the election corrupt” and appoint a special lawyer.
The Department of Justice resisted every lawsuit.
The testimony also focused on a tense Oval Office clash on January 3, 2021, in which Trump contemplated replacing Rosen with a lower-ranking official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to defend Trump’s false allegations of election fraud. . Donoghue and another senior Justice Department official, Steven Engel, warned Trump that there would be mass resignations in the department if Trump followed his plan. Only then did Trump give in.
The night, and later his administration, ended with Rosen still at work.
Clark’s name referred to the beginning of the hearing, with Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger ridiculing him as a lawyer whose only qualification was his allegiance to Trump. A Clark attorney did not return an email prior to the hearing.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot learned Thursday that Donald Trump wanted to replace the attorney general with Jeff Clark, then deputy attorney general in the Environment and Natural Resources Division. (Susan Walsh / The Associated Press)
“Who is Jeff Clark?” Kinzinger rhetorically asked. “He would do whatever the president wanted him to do, including overthrowing a free and fair democratic election.”
Just an hour before the hearing began, it was revealed that federal agents searched Clark’s home in Virginia this week, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak on his behalf. he spoke on condition of anonymity. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney confirmed the existence of police activities in Virginia, where Clark lives, but did not say what he was connected to.
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Trump had planned to cancel the election “first for fraud and then for violence”: Frum
‘[Trump] he had a plan to cancel the election, first for fraud and then for violence, “David Frum of The Atlantic said of what the Jan. 6 committee hearings have so far revealed.
The hearing is the fifth this month of the committee investigating the pre-insurgency period at the U.S. Capitol, when Trump loyalists stormed the building while lawmakers certified the results of the election won by Joe Biden. Witnesses include police officers attacked at the Capitol, as well as lawyers, a television executive and local election officials who resisted demands to alter the results in favor of Trump.
The committee last week filed video-recorded statements from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who punished Trump’s allegations of fraud and resigned after failing to convince the president.
Thursday’s hearing focused on what happened next when Rosen, Barr’s top deputy, took over the department and was immediately harassed by Trump’s demands for action.
In a phone conversation, according to handwritten notes taken by Donoghue and made public by lawmakers last year, Trump addressed Rosen that “Say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and R. congressmen.”
MIRAR | Donoghue describes this moment:
Trump told US justice official: “Just say it was corrupt”
Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, testified before the congressional committee examining the U.S. Capitol riots that President Donald Trump told him to “just say [the 2020 election] it was corrupt and left the rest to me and the Republican congressmen. ‘
At the time, Trump was introduced by a Republican congressman, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, to Clark, who had joined the department in 2018 as chief environmental attorney and was later appointed to lead his civilian division. Clark has been summoned by the committee to make a statement, but was not among the witnesses on Thursday.
Clark, according to statements from other Justice Department officials, met with Trump even though department superiors ordered him not to do so and presented himself as impatient to help the president’s efforts to challenge the results of the elections. A report released last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee that painted Clark as a relentless supporter of Trump included a draft letter urging Georgia officials to convene a special legislative session to reconsider election results.
Clark wanted to send the letter, but Justice Department superiors refused.
Rosen explains the threat to fire him
The situation culminated on January 3, 2021, a Sunday, when Clark informed Rosen at a private meeting at the Justice Department that Trump wanted to replace him with Clark as acting attorney general. Rosen, according to the Senate report, responded that “there was no universe I could imagine in which this would ever happen” and that she would not accept a subordinate firing her.
Rosen then contacted the White House to request a meeting. That night, Rosen, Donoghue, and Engel, along with Clark, met with Trump and top White House attorneys for a controversial few-hour Oval Office meeting about whether the president should follow his plans. for a radical change of leadership in the department.
According to Rosen’s testimony, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is that you, Rosen, will do nothing to cancel the election.”
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Did Donald Trump break the law in his attempt to stay in power after 2020? That’s what the Jan. 6 House committee is trying to prove, with lots of evidence and dozens of witnesses, including some of the closest allies and even Trump’s family. This week, representatives of the Republican states of Arizona and Georgia stated that Trump tried to pressure them to find votes and cancel the election. This week, on the fourth official day of public hearings, more evidence has been presented showing Trump’s long journeys, and some of his inner circle, to push the “big lie” that the 2020 election was manipulated. Today in Front Burner, Aaron Blake of the Washington Post, about the evidence, the unanswered questions and what would be needed for a criminal charge against the former president.
Donoghue and Engel made it clear to Trump that they and a large number of other Justice Department officials would resign if Trump fired Rosen. White House lawyers said the same. Pat Cipollone, then the White House lawyer, said the letter Clark wanted to send was a “murder-suicide pact.”
“Steve Engel at one point said,‘ Jeff Clark will run a cemetery. And what will you do with a cemetery, “that there would be such an exodus of leadership,” Donoghue told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “So the president was told very firmly that this would happen.”
Donoghue also tried to dissuade Trump from believing that Clark had the legal background to do what the president wanted, as he was not a departmental criminal prosecutor.
“And he replied a little bit, ‘Well, I’ve made a lot of very complicated appeals and civil litigation, environmental litigation and things like that,'” Donoghue said. “And I said, ‘That’s it. You’re an environmental lawyer. if you go back to your office and we’ll call you when there is an oil spill. “