Three former Justice Department officials who threatened to resign rather than help then-President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election testified Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
During the fifth in an ongoing series of public hearings, the committee heard from former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel, who served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Trump administration.
Rosen, who assumed the role of acting attorney general after Barr’s departure, said that Trump also raised the issue of appointing a special counsel with him after he’d taken over. All three witnesses, and other officials appearing via video, described a meeting at the White House on Jan. 4, 2021, in which Trump threatened to fire Rosen and replace him with, a little-known Justice Department official who once served as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division and as assistant attorney general of the environment and natural resources division.
Jeffrey Clark, then-assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division, addresses a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, on Sept. 14, 2020. In an email responding to Clark, Donoghue wrote that sending such a letter could have “grave consequences for the country,” arguing, “it may have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”
The committee also showed clips of depositions in which former White House officials, including Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testified about receiving requests for pardons from Republican members of Congress.
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