The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection held its fifth public hearing Thursday afternoon, this time homing in on former President Donald Trump’s relentless but unsuccessful attempts to pressure the Justice Department to collaborate with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The hearing centered primarily on live testimony from three former Justice Department officials who bucked Trump’s attempts to discredit the electron using the power of their agency: Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general; Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general; and Steven Engel, who led the department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The committee also revealed evidence of people seeking pardons from Trump in the final days of his presidency.
The witnesses vividly described meetings with Trump and his various strategies to use the Justice Department for his own political gain, including angling to install lawyer Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general. Unlike his fellow Justice Department officials, Clark, then the acting head of the civil division, was willing to side with Trump’s disinformation campaign about election fraud. Trump declined to promote Clark only after Donoghue threatened that there would be mass resignations from department officials in response.
The officials also described having to constantly bat down unsubstantiated election fraud claims and outrageous conspiracy theories — Donoghue was once forced to watch a kooky YouTube video of a conspiracy theory that a State Department official in Italy, alongside British intelligence and the CIA, was conspiring to manipulate U.S. votes. Donoghue deemed the theory “pure insanity” in an email to Rosen. Justice Department leaders also had to remind Trump of the “very limited” purview of the Justice Department when it comes to intervening in elections, which is mainly about civil rights responsibilities and criminal conduct in federal elections. The Justice Department doesn’t exercise collective quality control or investigate minor, inconsequential irregularities in elections.
But of course, Trump’s goal wasn’t to investigate systematic election fraud — a nonexistent phenomenon that he nonetheless amplified with gusto — but to exploit the gravitas of the department to discredit the election. His intentions couldn’t have gotten any clearer than in this damning quote — perhaps the most iconic line of the hearing: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Justice Department officials, according to Donoghue’s contemporaneous notes of a meeting on Dec. 27, 2020.
The committee also revealed evidence of people seeking pardons from Trump in the final days of his presidency, including Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama. Brooks requested a pardon for all lawmakers who voted against certifying electors — including himself.
As MSNBC columnist Jessica Levinson wrote in a blog post Thursday: “Perhaps, some lawmakers feared politically motivated criminal charges by Biden’s future DOJ. Perhaps. But another explanation, arguably the much more straightforward explanation, is that these members of Congress knew or feared they broke the law.”
