By Todd Lassa
(Go to The Gray Area for a link to the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.)
Republican House members Matt Gaetz (FL), Louis Gohmert (TX) and Scott Perry (PA) asked Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, for a blanket pardon. Rep. Jim Jordan (OH) and Andy Biggs (AZ) didn’t ask her directly, though they were named Thursday. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (GA) asked for a blanket pre-emptive pardon after January 6 as well.
“The only reason I know you ask for a pardon is that you think you committed a crime,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (IL), one of two Republicans with Liz Cheney (WY) on the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, concluded after hours of testimony from then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Assistant Attorneys General Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel on their efforts to quash Donald J. Trump’s schemes to overturn the Electoral College count.
“Justice Department lawyers are not the president’s lawyers,” Kinzinger said.
And in their pushback against Trump’s efforts on January 3, 2021 to install Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer who had never handled a criminal case nor a court case, as acting AG in what would have been a more-intense, Watergate-like Sunday Night Massacre, Rosen, Donoghue and Engel had commitments from DOJ’s other assistant attorneys general – save one who would remain to prevent complete chaos – to resign under such circumstances.
Hours before Thursday’s public hearings, the 1/6 panel’s fifth, CNN reported that federal investigators had conducted a search on Wednesday of Clark’s home, and that panel members were not made aware of the search prior to the hearing.
Leading the hearing, Kinzinger introduced evidence and heard testimony of how Trump and his supporters tried to push Rosen’s DOJ to investigate several conspiracy theories to back the former president’s false assertion that the November 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Clark’s only qualification to replace Rosen, Kinzinger said, was “that he would do anything the president wanted him to do to overturn the election.”
Between December 23, 2020, when William Barr resigned as attorney general, and January 3, when Trump threatened to replace Rosen with Clark, Rosen and Trump met “every day, with one or two exceptions,” on Christmas Day. Trump told Rosen he thought the Justice Department had not done enough to investigate “voter fraud,” wanted Rosen to meet with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and wanted the DOJ to file a suit in the Supreme Court to stop the January 6 Electoral College count.
“The Justice Department declined all of them,” Rosen said. “We did not think they were appropriate considering the facts and laws as we understood them.”
Among Trump’s fraud/conspiracy theories that Rosen, Donoghue and Engel had rejected – as described in earlier testimony by Barr -- included a report by the Allied Security Group that claimed Antrim County, Michigan’s “error” rate in counting ballots from Dominion Voting Systems was 68%. Yet the county’s election officials hand counted its 15,000 presidential election ballots and found “exactly one” miscount, or 0.0063% error, Donoghue said.
In another theory derived from the Internet, a semi-truckload of ballots allegedly was driven from New York to Pennsylvania on November 3. “It was not true,” Donoghue said (the driver has never been identified.)
“There was a series of others, mostly in swing states,” he said.
Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows called Rosen and asked him to meet with Bradley Johnson, described in an internet video as a retired CIA official, who claimed to have evidence that an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite that zapped votes to switch them from Trump to Joe Biden.
Rosen told Meadows that Johnson could take his theory to any of 55 FBI field offices. Meadows “first accepted, then called back” and said he spoke with Giuliani, who said it was “insulting that (Johnson would) have to go to an FBI field office.” Kash Patel, chief of staff to the acting defense secretary, told Rosen that Johnson was in custody in Italy at the time under cyber-offense charges.
Unlike Rosen, Clark was willing to send the Georgia general assembly a letter calling on them to hold a special session and consider a new slate of electors (a draft letter first reported late last year). In the January 3 Oval Office standoff, Trump backed down when faced with Rosen and his assistant AGs resigning over Rosen’s refusal to sign the letter. Trump asked Rosen whether he should fire Clark.
After Kinzinger’s closing comments, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) addressed Trump supporters, saying the committee has heard from nearly a dozen Republicans, with more to come in next month’s hearings. “It can be difficult to accept that Donald Trump abused your trust,” she said, “that he deceived you. But that is a fact. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.”
(THU 6/23/22)