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.

“From the Oval Office, President Trump urged others to bring his ‘big lie’ to life,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said. “He didn’t care what the department’s investigation proved. What good were facts when they only confirmed his loss?” Kinzinger said.

“After today, I suspect there will be some who label you agents of the ‘deep state’ or something else conspiratorial or nonsensical meant to justify ignoring what you’ve said today, ignoring the facts,” Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told the former Justice Department officials who testified. “That may be the short-term cost to acting honorable, and telling the truth should have an important long-term impact,” she continued.

Thompson said the committee’s hearings so far have “shown the inner workings of what was essentially a political coup” that was “in service of Donald Trump.” He said that future hearings would highlight how Trump’s pressure on lawmakers, election officials and law enforcement eventually gave way to his support for threats of violence that resulted in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

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.

The Republican also requested that questions be only asked by the members of Congress on the committee. If the committee is going to “ask questions” about content found in statements and electronic or written communications, he wants these documents to be turned in to his office “a minimum” of seven days before the deposition, so Brooks “can refresh his memory.”

Finally, Brooks is demanding that the deposition be conducted on a day on which the House is voting, so that he is already physically present in Washington.

“Quite frankly, I don’t believe I have knowledge of January 6 events that are not already known or that add to what the Committee already knows,” the congressman said in his statement. “I will voluntarily appear before the Committee to give sworn testimony providing the five requirements mentioned above are met.”

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.

“Jeff Clark will be left leading a graveyard,” Donoghue warned the former president.

Donoghue stressed to Trump that the Justice Department had concluded there was no widespread voter fraud based on “actual investigations” that authorities had conducted across the country.

“The president said, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And it was actually a good opening because I said, ‘Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose,’ ” Donoghue testified to the committee.

Donoghue testified that Trump instructed him to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

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.

But as the committee demonstrated on Thursday, Italygate also made its way to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a YouTube video about it on Dec. 31, 2020, asking: “Why can’t we just work with the Italian government?”

Meadows discussed the claim “frequently,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said, and pressed acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to investigate. “I told him this whole thing about Italy had been debunked,” Rosen said in today’s hearing.

Then Kash Patel, a Defense Department official, called Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue. “Patently absurd,” Donoghue called the claim Thursday.

Finally, the acting secretary of the Defense Department, Christopher Miller, called an attache in Rome to ask that they also investigate.

“This is one of the best examples of the lengths to which President Trump would go to stay in power, scouring the internet to support his conspiracy theories,” Kinzinger said.

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.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the committee, said another Justice official, Ken Klukowski — who had sent a draft of the letter to Clark — had worked with Eastman. It was Eastman who had separately been working for weeks with Trump on plans aimed at overturning the election.

Klukowski was assigned to work with Clark and “worked with John Eastman …[who] was one of the primary architects of President Trump’s scheme to overturn the election,” Cheney said.

Clark’s bosses, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, who both testified at the hearing, rejected Clark’s request that they sign the letter.

Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, said, “I thought Jeff’s proposal was nuts.”

Herschmann said that when Clark finished discussing his plan, he told Clark: “Congratulations. You just admitted your first step or act that you take as attorney general would be committing a felony … You’re clearly the right candidate for this job.”

In other developments:

• Clark’s superiors at the Justice Department believed he was unqualified to become attorney general. When Clark tried to convince Trump in a Jan. 3 meeting at the Oval Office that he was experienced because of his work on environmental law, Donoghue said, “You’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill?”
• The committee released White House visitor logs that showed how Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) brought Clark to a December 2020 meeting with Trump.

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.

“He told me he’d asked Meadows for a pardon,” McEntee testified of Gaetz.

Hutchinson testified that she was involved with conversations about requests from Gaetz, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert and Perry, who had all sought pardons. “Mr. Perry asked for one as well,” she said, answering affirmatively when asked if Perry had spoken to her directly. Perry had previously denied asking for a pardon.

In addition, Hutchinson said that she heard from Patrick Philbin, a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office, that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) had contacted the office and asked for a pardon but that she had not spoken to the Georgia congresswoman directly.

She said that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also asked whether the White House would be issuing pardons for members of Congress who had objected to the election results but that she did not recall him personally requesting one for himself.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said.

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.”

“As far as the White House was concerned, Mr. Clark was already at the top of the Justice Department,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said.

Two hours later, the Justice Department’s leaders arrived at the White House and met with Clark, who they challenged into producing evidence of his election fraud theories.

Then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who was at the meeting, said Trump told him he wasn’t “going to do anything” about his claims of fraud.

“This other guy at least might do something,” Trump said of Clark, Rosen recalled.

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.

“So after some preliminaries, the president turned to me and he said: ‘Well, one thing we know is you, Rosen, you aren’t going to do anything. You don’t even agree with the claims of election fraud,’ ” Rosen testified. “ ‘And this other guy at least might do something.’ ”

Rosen shared how Trump’s assumptions about his actions were spot on — and why.

“And then I said: ‘Well, Mr. President, you’re right that I’m not going to allow the Justice Department to do anything to try to overturn the election. That’s true. But the reason for that is because that’s what’s consistent with the facts and the law and that’s what’s required under the Constitution,’ ” he said.

“So that’s the right answer and a good thing for the country,” Rosen said he told Trump. “And therefore, I submit it’s the right thing for you, Mr. President.”