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Special counsel Jack Smith’s election investigation has included all kinds of interviews, but NBC News’ new reporting on one particular witness stood out.
Former senior Justice Department official Richard Donoghue says he has been interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s office, but has not been called to testify before the federal grand jury investigating Jan. 6 and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Donoghue, who confirmed the meeting with Smith’s office to NBC News on Monday, served as acting deputy attorney general near the end of the Trump administration.
I suspect Donoghue’s name is probably not familiar to much of the public, but given his unique perspective and experiences with Donald Trump, it’s a good thing federal investigators sought him out.
In December 2020, for example, Trump pressed the Justice Department’s top two officials on voter-fraud claims they knew to be false. The officials — Donoghue and acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen — responded by telling the then-president that they could not help him change the election’s outcome.
Trump said he was asking for something slightly different. “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me” and to the White House’s GOP allies in Congress the then-president said, according to Donoghue’s written notes.
As we’ve discussed, it was striking evidence that Trump effectively asked Justice Department officials to lie, at which point some congressional Republicans would advance the rest of the scheme to overturn the results.
But that’s not the only area of interest. In the immediate aftermath of his election defeat, Trump said election workers in Atlanta corrupted the vote tallies by taking improper ballots from suitcases. The claims were immediately discredited by, among others, his own Justice Department: It was Donoghue who told the outgoing president directly that the matter had been reviewed by federal law enforcement and the accusations were baseless.
After one conversation in which the then-president referenced an imagined suitcase filled with fraudulent ballots, Donoghue told Trump, “No, sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carried the ballots. And that’s just how they moved ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all.”
But wait, there’s more. In the post-election period, Trump considered a plan in which he’d fire Rosen, the then-acting attorney general, and replace him with Jeffrey Clark as part of a scheme to ramp up the Justice Department’s anti-election efforts. The then-president was prepared to do this because Clark, unlike Rosen, was telling Trump what he wanted to hear about keeping him in power, despite his defeat.
Indeed, Clark sketched out a map for Republican legislators to follow as part of a partisan plot, even as he quietly pressed Trump to put him in charge of the Justice Department.
Trump ultimately backed away from the plan to make Clark the acting A.G., not because the plan was stark raving mad — though it certainly was — but because the Justice Department’s senior leadership, including Donoghue, team threatened to resign en masse if Rosen was ousted.
All of which is to say, the fact that Donoghue had a chat with the special counsel’s office about his experiences is not great news for Team Trump.