Jan. 6 hearing recap Trump White House aides say multiple GOP members of Congress asked for pardons

The Jan. 6 committee closed its remarks stressing that Donald Trump sought to appoint someone pushing conspiracies as attorney general after Justice Department officials confirmed that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

“He hoped that law enforcement officials would give the appearance of legitimacy to his lies so he and his allies had some veneer of credibility when they told the country that the election was stolen,” Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in closing remarks.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) agreed to testify before the Jan. 6 committee but only under a set of conditions.

Brooks, in a statement sent to reporters as Thursday’s hearing unfolded, said he had his “reservations” about the committee but that he would “voluntarily submit” to a deposition if five requirements are met.

Brooks, who during Thursday’s hearing was said by White House aides to be one of the House Republicans who asked for a presidential pardon, is requiring the deposition be public and that questions be “relevant to, and limited to, events surrounding” the insurrection.

Richard Donoghue, when he was acting deputy attorney general, told President Donald Trump that the Justice Department would see “hundreds and hundreds” of mass resignations among the agency’s rank and file if Trump fired top leadership to appoint an election denier as attorney general.

“Within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations in the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions. What’s that going to say about you?” Donoghue said he told the president, in testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.

Of all the fantastical false claims of fraud and vote manipulation in 2020, “Italygate” was one of the most extreme.

The claim was that an Italian defense contractor had conspired with senior CIA officials to use military satellites to flip votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. As The Washington Post has reported, it was pushed by a Virginia horse-country socialite who once gave an extended television interview from a 22-bedroom mansion that she repeatedly described as her own, even though it was not.

Dramatic details about an effort by a mid-level Justice Department official to become attorney general and seek to overturn the election were revealed at Thursday’s hearing by the Jan. 6 committee, including a previously unreported role played by Trump legal adviser John Eastman.

The hearing focused on the effort by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the civil division, who also had overseen environmental matters. Clark proposed sending a letter to officials in key states that said that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump” for Congress to approve.

Multiple Republican members of Congress asked White House officials if President Donald Trump would preemptively pardon them for their activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6 before he left office, testimony provided by Trump White House aides to the Jan. 6 committee shows.

The members included Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.) and Scott Perry (Pa.), the testimony showed.

The allegations came from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and John McEntee, a close aide to Trump.

The committee revealed that on Jan. 3, 2021, the White House began referring to Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as the acting attorney general — meaning that, in the administration’s eyes, Clark was the head of the Justice Department and had the power to use it to validate Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

With this move, the White House was seemingly prepared to use the department to lend legitimacy to Trump’s falsehoods.

White House call logs unveiled by the committee showed that Clark and Trump had been in “constant communication” starting at 7 a.m. that day. The last log, at 4:19 p.m., showed that the White House no longer referred to Clark as “Mr. Jeffrey Clark,” but rather as “Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Clark.”

Jeffrey A. Rosen explained the pressure he and other top Justice Department officials were under from President Donald Trump to use the department to interfere in the 2020 election results in a manner that would keep him in power.

Rosen refused the president, and a number of the officials threatened to resign if Jeffrey Clark, a Trump supporter who lacked the experience to run the department, was officially named the acting attorney general.

Rosen, then the acting head of the department, explained a meeting between Trump and several Justice Department officials to discuss the president’s latest plan to stop Joe Biden’s win from moving forward.