A rebellion by the heads of the United States Department of Justice and Attorney General's Office, by threatening to resign en masse, prevented Donald Trump from using the country's judicial machinery to annul the result of the 2020 presidential elections and remain in office. can. This was testified this Thursday by the rebellious prosecutors themselves before the committee investigating the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the previous attempts to simulate electoral fraud in order to prevent the transition in the White House after the victory of Joe Biden.
The revolt occurred when, in view of the refusal of the Justice staff to officially denounce the alleged fraud and act accordingly, the still acting president tried to replace the interim attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, with an inexperienced lawyer for the office, but obedient to Trump: Jeffrey Clark.
"I will not work for a minute for this guy, who I just declared incompetent," then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told the president, according to his statement.
Donoghue explained that Trump turned to Steven Engel, deputy attorney general for the Office of Government Legal Counsel, and asked, "Steve, you wouldn't quit, would you?" Engel responded, according to his own testimony: "I told him: 'Mr. President, I have been with you with four attorneys general, including two interim attorneys, but I cannot be part of this."
Donoghue also warned the president that they would not be the only ones to leave if he insisted on substituting Rosen to force the nullification of the elections without legal basis. "I told him, 'Nobody cares if I quit. But they're going to lose every single one of the attendees. The whole Department will be gone in a few hours; in twenty-four, forty-eight or seventy-two hours I could have hundreds of resignations. at his table...because of his actions," he recalled.
And he also highlighted how Steve Engel came to say: 'Jeff Clark will be in front of a cemetery".
The warning worked, because Trump had no choice but to keep the heads of the Prosecutor's Office in their posts.
“If the Department had become that involved in the political process, the country would have suffered serious consequences that could very well have led to a constitutional crisis,” Donoghue said. And he explained that he reviewed point by point the "arsenal of accusations" of fraud that Trump brandished, to conclude "that no, they were not true."
Jeffrey Rosen, who had just replaced Attorney General Bill Barr after his resignation in disagreement with Trump's claims, recalled how the president called or summoned him practically every day since he took office on December 24, 2020 until early January , when he ceased for the presidential relief. "The common theme was dissatisfaction with what the Department of Justice was doing - or rather, failing to do when finding no cause - to investigate voter fraud."
The judicial agency and Attorney General's Office "rejected all those requests (from Trump) because we did not think they were in accordance with the facts or the law," Rosen remarked.
The prosecutors' rebellion took place on January 3, 2021, three days before the assault on Capitol Hill, in which thousands of Trump supporters took over the headquarters of Congress with the result of nine deaths, five of them at the time of the attacks. facts.
Yesterday's hearing coincided with an entry and search by federal agents at the home of Jeffrey Clark, within the police investigations into the attempted coup of 6-E.
Clark's attempts to carry out Trump's instructions included drafting and attempting to send - with the chiefs of the Attorney General's signature - a letter that spoke of irregularities in the electoral process and urged Georgia officials to convene a special legislative session to reconsider the election results. The heads of the Department refused to sign and process the letter. Donoghue testified Thursday that he had to read it twice to make sure he fully understood what Clark was proposing "because it was too extreme for me," he said.
The situation became critical when Clark himself informed Rosen privately of Trump's intention to replace him as head of the Prosecutor's Office. Rosen refused to be fired for a subordinate, and called his closest aides to gather them and appear before Trump at the White House. It was the meeting of the revolt, on Sunday, January 3, in the Oval Office. And the rebellion succeeded.
