Integrity Score 180
No Records Found
No Records Found
Jan 6 committee has brought out in the meeting about the pressure Trump put on the officials at the justice department to pursue groundless claims of voter fraud in an extraordinary but eventually unsuccessful effort to cling to power,
Three former justice department officials who served during Trump’s final weeks in office, told the committee that the then-president was “adamant” that the election was ransacked despite begin told repeatedly that none of the allegations put forward about the vote count were reasonable.
Opening the hearing, the panel’s chair, congressman Bennie Thompson, said the hearing would show that the former president sought to “misuse the justice department as part of his plan to hold on to power”.
“Donald Trump didn’t just want the justice department to investigate,” Thompson said. “He wanted the justice department to help legitimate his lies, to call the election corrupt.”
After exhausting his legal options and being affronted by state and local elections officials, the panel said a frantic Trump turned to the justice department to proclaim the election corrupt despite no indication of mass voter fraud, the nine-member panel will seek to show in their fifth and final hearing of the month.
Testifying from the Cannon Caucus Room on Capitol Hill are Jeffrey Rosen, the former acting attorney general; Richard Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general; and Steven Engel, the former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel.
In one of the near-daily conversations Trump had with the agency’s leader, Rosen told the president that the Department of Justice “can’t and won’t snap his fingers and change the outcome of an election”.
“I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump snapped back, according to Donoghue, whose handwritten notes of the exchange were exhibited on a large screen during the hearing. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump said.
Source: The Guardian.