The Daily Fuckup

On June 23, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack used its fifth public hearing to put Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on the Justice Department in the record, under oath. The session centered on testimony from former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and former Office of Legal Counsel chief Steven Engel. Their accounts described a White House effort to get the department to validate false claims of election fraud and to keep that narrative alive after election officials, courts, and senior Justice Department lawyers had refused to back it.

The hearing also laid out the push to install Jeffrey Clark, a lower-ranking Justice Department lawyer who appeared more willing to advance Trump’s fraud claims. According to the testimony and documents discussed at the hearing, Trump and some of his advisers explored replacing Rosen with Clark after Rosen and Donoghue resisted demands to issue statements or take action that would lend official weight to the false claims. Donoghue told lawmakers Trump asked, in substance, what would happen if he made the switch and that he would resign immediately if Clark were put in charge. Engel said he would have no choice but to resign as well.

That exchange was central because it showed the pressure was not just about complaints or political spin. It was about using the Justice Department itself as leverage in a bid to change the outcome Trump had already lost. The committee also discussed a draft letter linked to Clark that would have urged state officials to reconsider the election results, along with testimony that Trump wanted department leaders to approve something they had not found credible. The point was not that the scheme succeeded. It was that Trump kept trying to pull DOJ into the fight.

The hearing made the basic sequence harder to dispute: Trump lost, refused to accept it, pressed the Justice Department to validate his claims, and searched for officials who might help him do it. The department is supposed to sit apart from political demands, especially when those demands reach into the legitimacy of a presidential election. On June 23, the committee showed what happened when that boundary came under direct pressure from the Oval Office, and why the effort mattered even though senior Justice Department officials refused to go along.