Top Justice Dept. officials and White House lawyers made clear to then-President Trump in January that they'd resign if Trump replaced his acting AG with an ally who was pushing to overturn the 2020 election, according to Senate Judiciary Cmte. report.
The report outlines that Trump wanted to replace acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, the then-acting head of the department's civil division, who devised a strategy with the president for the DOJ to intervene in Georgia’s appointment of presidential electors and to use this model in other states. Rosen and then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, however, rejected Clark’s proposal.
Donoghue said that the rest of the meeting involved “a wide-ranging conversation” focused on whether Trump should replace the DOJ’s leadership and install Clark in Rosen’s place, the report said. But during the meeting, the report said that Donoghue and Steven Engel, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, conveyed to Trump that if he followed through on the threat, all of the assistant attorneys general would resign.
The committee said that Donoghue and Rosen recounted that White House counsel Pat Cipollone called Trump’s plan a “murder-suicide pact.” Cipollone and another White House lawyer, Patrick Philbin, indicated “that they would also resign.” The report said that Trump didn’t stand down until the final 15 minutes of the meeting.
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