A large section of senior officials in the US Department of Justice threatened to leave early last year. This came on the fifth day of hearings in the House of Representatives about the attack on the Capitol on January 6 last year.
Then-President Trump wanted to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who believed in Trump’s statements that widespread fraud had been committed in the late 2020 presidential election. The judges ignored all objections from Trump and his team.
The judiciary did not like the change of power and threatened immediate departure if Trump fired Rosen. Rosen, by the way, was only a minister for a short time. He took office after the departure of William Barr.
Daily phone calls
According to Rosen, Trump regularly claimed that the Department of Justice “did not do enough” to investigate allegations that the elections were “stolen” through voter fraud. “Between December 23 and January 3, the president called or spoke to me almost daily,” Rosen told the committee.
According to Rosen, Trump wanted the Department of Justice to issue a statement questioning the outcome of the election. Trump is said to have said, “Leave the rest to me and the Republicans.” Rosen told the committee members that justice shouldn’t know about it. “We followed the law and the facts.”
Attorney General Richard Donoghue said Trump had spoken of an “arsenal of allegations” that would be made public. He said that the statement that justice should have distributed would have seriously politicized the ministry. “It would have led to a constitutional crisis.”
Grace or grace
The day of the interrogation also revealed that several Republican members of Congress, including prominent Trump loyalists such as Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gates, had offered Trump a pardon. They attended a meeting with Trump to discuss options for changing the election outcome. They feared that they would be sued for it.
One lawmaker acknowledged the pardon, saying he did so out of fear of an “abuse of the justice system” by Democrats. Another member of Congress denies this. Trump did nothing about the pardon.
