The Daily Fuckup

The House Jan. 6 committee’s June 23, 2022 hearing focused on one of the most aggressive parts of Donald Trump’s post-election pressure campaign: his effort to get the Justice Department to validate claims that had already been rejected by courts, state officials and members of his own team. The hearing was not about a new allegation so much as a fuller public record. Committee witnesses and documents described repeated contacts with senior Justice Department officials and Trump’s interest in putting Jeffrey Clark in a top department post. ([docs.house.gov](https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventId=114899))

According to the committee’s presentation, Trump pressed then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue to support his fraud claims. The panel also pointed to the Jan. 3, 2021 episode in which senior Justice Department lawyers said they were prepared to resign if Trump removed Rosen and installed Clark, who was more willing to circulate a letter advancing Trump’s election narrative. ([docs.house.gov](https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20230607/116064/HHRG-118-GO00-20230607-SD016.pdf))

That detail mattered because it showed the pressure was not limited to complaints behind closed doors. It was a bid to move the department itself closer to Trump’s preferred outcome. The official hearing record says the committee’s witnesses included Rosen, Donoghue and Steven Engel, and the transcript of the hearing lays out their account of the discussions surrounding Clark and the effort to use Justice Department authority to bolster the false claims. ([docs.house.gov](https://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventId=114899))

The testimony also underscored how close Trump’s team came to changing Justice Department leadership. AP’s contemporaneous reporting described the hearing as revisiting the Jan. 3 confrontation in which attorneys inside the White House and Justice Department threatened to quit if Trump fired Rosen and named Clark. The central point was narrow but consequential: Trump pushed hard enough that senior officials saw the move as a crisis for the department. ([apnews.com](https://apnews.com/article/19d8af3b8cd17c67af8a327ac9a815a1))

By the time the hearing ended, the committee had put another set of names, dates and internal exchanges into the public record. The case it made was not that Trump simply refused to accept defeat. It was that he repeatedly looked for a way to use the machinery of government to give his false election claims official force. ([docs.house.gov](https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO00/20230607/116064/HHRG-118-GO00-20230607-SD016.pdf))