so you are ok with this
Well before the Jan. 6 select committee hearings began, a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation—which resulted in depositions of
former Acting Deputy Attorney General
Richard Donoghue,
former Acting Attorney General
Jeffrey Rosen, and
former U.S. attorney
BJay Pak, and a
report back in
October 2021—already released a lot of evidence on Trump’s near-decapitation of the Justice Department leadership in the run-up to Jan. 6.
As a result, the general outline of this story, and many of its details, were already well known by the time the committee’s hearings began: After Attorney General William Barr resigned, having refused to take up Trump’s bogus allegations, senior Justice Department officials told Trump they could not support his claims of election fraud, and Trump sought to fire these officials and offered the attorney general position to Jeffrey Clark.
Nonetheless, the committee’s presentation on this point is among the most powerful evidence it provided. It focused on the machinations at the upper echelons of the Justice Department during its June 23 hearing, during which it heard witness testimony from Richard Donoghue, Jeffrey Rosen, and former Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel—all of whom provided further detail on the extent of Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department.