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| Photo Credit: AP. |
The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 violent siege at the U.S. Capitol will hear how former President Donald Trump pressured Justice Department officials to try to use available legal instruments to upturn the 2020 elections.
Former
Justice Department officials will testify at the panel on Thursday as lawmakers
try to establish a case that the former President’s action was an abuse of his
power as well as criminal as he tried repeatedly to coerce the DOJ into submission
to do what he wanted.
The House
will hear how the former President tried to leverage the powers of federal
executive branch agencies to perpetuate himself in power despite losing the
2020 elections.
Some of the witnesses
expected to testify at the panel include Jeffrey Rosen, who was acting attorney
general during the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, according to The
Associated Press. Rosen found himself in tense exchanges with Mr Trump at the
Oval Office three days earlier as the former President contemplated replacing
him with lower-level official, Jeffrey Clark, who is believed wanted to champion
Trump’s claims of election fraud, The Associated Press reported.
Others scheduled
to testify at the panel are two former DOJ officials, Rosen’s top deputy,
Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel. The duo warned Trump at the White House
that they’d resign, and that many of the department’s lawyers would follow, if
he went ahead to replace Rosen with Clark.
“You could
have a situation here, within 24 hours, you have hundreds of people resigning
from the Justice Department,” Donoghue has said he told Trump, according to The
Associated Press. “Is that good for anyone? Is it good for the department? Is
it good for the country? Is it good for you. It’s not.”
Faced with the
reality of possible resignations Mr Trump took no further action and Rosen
remained in his position. Just as Rosen took over office from Barr, Mr Trump
told Rosen in a phone conversation to “Just say the election was corrupt and
leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,” according to handwritten notes
taken by Donoghue and made public by lawmakers last year, The Associated Press
reported.
According to
The Associated Press, Trump was later introduced by a Republican congressman,
Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania to Clark, who’d joined the department in 2018
as chief environmental lawyer and later appointed to its civil division. Clark met
with Trump despite objections from bosses at the department and presented
himself as eager to aid the president’s efforts to overturn the election,
according to statements from other Justice Department officials, The Associated
Press reported.
The Senate
Judiciary Committee last year released a report detailing Clark’s role in a
draft letter pushing Georgia officials to convene a special legislative session
to reconsider the election results. The letter was not sent due to objections
from senior Justice Department officials.
The Senate
report also detailed how on January 3, 2021, a Sunday, Clark informed Rosen in
a private meeting at the Justice Department that Trump wanted to replace him
with Clark as acting attorney general, according to The Associated Press.
Rosen,
according to the Senate report, responded that “there was no universe I could
imagine in which that would ever happen” and that he would not accept being
fired by a subordinate.
Rosen then
contacted the White House requesting a meeting which held that night and Rosen,
Donoghue and Engel as well as Clark gathered with Trump and other top White
House lawyers for a meeting to decide whether the president would follow
through with his plans of radical leadership change at the DOJ.
Trump opened
the meeting by saying, “one thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do
anything to overturn the election,” The Associated Press said of testimony
given by Rosen.
The report
said Donoghue and Engel told Mr Trump that a large number of Justice Department
officials would resign if Trump fired Rosen, a stance which was also echoed by
White House lawyers.
“Steve Engel
at one point said, ‘Jeff Clark will be leading a graveyard. And what are you
going to get done with a graveyard,’ that there would be such an exodus of the
leadership,” Donoghue told the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to The Associated
Press. “So it was very strongly worded to the president that that would
happen.”
Donoghue
told Trump that Clark does not have the legal credentials to do what the
president wanted, arguing that he was not a criminal prosecutor at the
department.
“And he kind
of retorted by saying, ‘Well, I’ve done a lot of very complicated appeals and
civil litigation, environmental litigation, and things like that,’” Donoghue
said. “And I said, ‘That’s right. You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you
go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill.’”