Former Justice Department officials Richard Donoghue and Steve Engel told the Jan. 6 committee during a hearing Thursday that none of former President Donald Trump’s fraud claims about the 2020 election were credible.
Donoghue, who served as acting deputy attorney general from December 2020 to January 2021, and Engel, who was an assistant attorney general, shared their perspectives of Trump’s pressure campaign against the Department of Justice to intervene in several swing states.
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“It was incumbent on me to make it very clear to the president what our investigations had revealed and that we had concluded based on actual investigations, actual witness interviews, actual reviews of documents, that these allegations simply had no merit,” Donoghue said of a Dec. 27, 2020, phone call with Trump.
“I wanted to try to cut through the noise because it was clear to us that there were a lot of people whispering in his ear, feeding him these conspiracy theories and allegations,” he continued. “I felt that being very blunt in that conversation might help make it clear to the president these allegations were simply not true.”
Donoghue recalled telling Trump between the election and Jan. 6, the day the Capitol riot disrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, that the DOJ lacked authority to intervene.
“The bottom line was if a state ran their election in such a way that it was defective, that is to the state or Congress to correct. It is not for the Justice Department to step in,” he said.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who resigned in December 2020, has emerged as a star witness in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation. He has testified that the DOJ did look into Trump’s claims of voter fraud and was not able to find evidence to show there was sufficient malfeasance to overturn the election. However, even after he departed the agency, Trump’s pressure campaign continued.
Donoghue and other deputies threatened to resign when Trump considered replacing acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen with acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, who supported some of Trump’s fraud claims and appeared willing to use the DOJ to put pressure on election officials in Georgia. Donoghue recalled telling the president that the DOJ inserting itself into a state election “would have had grave consequences for the country. It may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”
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Donoghue and other top DOJ officials were able to convince Trump not to go through with installing Clark as acting attorney general at a Jan. 3, 2021, meeting in the Oval Office, with Donoghue telling the president that Clark would be “presiding over a graveyard” due to the number of resignations that would follow the appointment. Clark has pleaded the fifth during his interviews with the committee, according to Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS).
Trump told Fox News in December 2020 that the DOJ was “missing in action” with regard to his election concerns. Donoghue and Engel testified on Thursday alongside Rosen.
