Top Department of Justice officials gave testimony at the fifth session of the House select committee looking into the Capitol riot on January 6 about how they resisted former President Donald Trump’s attempts to rig the 2020 election.
Public and private attempts culminated in an Oval Office meeting days before the incident on January 6, where senior Justice Department employees threatened to leave if Trump planned to choose Jeffrey Clark as the agency’s head because he was willing to help with Trump’s intentions.
Live testimony was given by Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general, and Steven Engel, the director of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, all former senior Justice Department officials who rejected Trump at the time.
The committee opted to shift the remaining scheduled hearings into July, which MPs said would give more time to examine new evidence. As a result, Thursday’s session is the last one this month.
According to testimony from former White House officials, aides, and attorneys shown to the committee on January 6, at least five House Republicans, including Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, asked Trump’s White House for presidential pardons after the Capitol riot.
GOP Representative Scott Perry, Focus Of Donoghue’s Campaign To Appoint Clark To The DOJ
According to Donoghue’s testimony, Trump allegedly ordered Donoghue and Rosen in December to simply claim the election was fraudulent and leave the rest to him and the Republican legislators
In light of Donoghue’s testimony, efforts to elevate Clark focus on GOP Rep. Scott Perry.
The committee addressed how a ridiculous conspiracy theory involving the Italian government spread across the Trump administration and revealed that the Defense secretary asked an Italian official for clarification on it.
The session highlighted a notoriously tumultuous period at the department during which Trump pushed, in his final days in office, to subjugate a law enforcement organization that had long prized its independence from the White House. The testimony was intended to demonstrate that Trump attempted to use the authority of federal executive branch agencies in addition to relying on outside advisers to forward his bogus accusations of election fraud.
However, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania was among the GOP members who asked for a pardon from Trump, according to Cheney, who testified at the committee’s initial hearing last month.
Last Monday, the committee presented evidence that in an email to Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, a lawyer who supports Donald Trump, requested that his name be placed on a “pardon list.”
