Donald Trump pressured the Justice Department to repeat its false claims of voter fraud, striving in vain to recruit top law enforcement officials in his desperate bid to stay in power.
Three Trump Justice Department officials recounted a relentless pressure campaign by the president on them to stress that the election won by Democrat Joe Biden had been stolen from him.
The officials described his procedures as a clear violation of protocol in the case of a department noted for its independence from the White House, but said they rejected each of his demands because there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
“If the Department were to insert itself into the political process in this way, I think it would have had serious consequences that could very well have led to a constitutional crisis,” said Richard Donoghue, the Department’s second acting official.
The president, he said, had this “arsenal of accusations. I went through them piece by piece to say no, they weren’t true.”
Another witness, Jeffrey Rosen, who was acting attorney general, said Trump met with him every day from the time he took office in late December 2020 until early January 2021. And that the common theme was his “dissatisfaction with what the Department of Justice had done to investigate voter fraud.” It was a “blatant attempt” to use the Justice Department for his own political gain, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi and co-chairman of the Jan. 6 Committee.
“Donald Trump didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate,” Thompson said. “He wanted the Justice Department to help him legitimize his lies, basically calling the elections corrupt” and appointing a special prosecutor.
But the Justice Department resisted. As in previous hearings, the committee focused on lawmakers who had aligned themselves with Trump’s efforts.
On Thursday, the panel played taped interviews from Trump advisers who said several Republican members of Congress requested pardons in the days after the violent riot on Capitol Hill. The testimony also focused on a tense standoff in the Oval Office on Jan. 3, 2021, in which Trump considered replacing Rosen with a lower-level official, Jeffrey Clark, willing to defend false claims of voter fraud made by the president. President.
Donoghue and another top Justice Department official, Steven Engel, told Trump there would be mass resignations at the department if Trump went ahead with his plan. Only then did Trump relent.
Just an hour before the hearing began, it was revealed that federal agents this week searched Clark’s home in Virginia. A spokesman for the US attorney confirmed the existence of police activity in Virginia, where Clark lives, but did not say what he was connected to.
The panel’s hearing was the fifth this month for the House committee investigating the lead-up to the insurrection on Capitol Hill, when Trump loyalists stormed the building as lawmakers certified the results of elections won by Biden.
Witnesses included police officers attacked on Capitol Hill, as well as lawyers, a television executive and local election officials who resisted demands to change the results in Trump’s favor.
Last week, the committee released videotaped statements from former Attorney General William Barr, who criticized Trump’s fraud claims 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 besieged by Trump’s demands for action.
In a phone conversation, according to notes taken by Donoghue at Thursday’s hearing, Trump told Rosen to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the congressional Republicans.”
