Senate report details clash with Trump over pressure to overturn election: Justice Dept., White House officials threatened to quit

[PanamaSteve]

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The report offers the most complete account yet of how government lawyers vowed to resign en masse if President Donald Trump removed his attorney general for refusing to help overturn the election. By Devlin Barrett Today at 8:45 a.m. EDT A Senate report on President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election offers new details about an Oval Office confrontation between Trump and the Justice Department, revealing the extent to which government lawyers threatened to resign en masse if the president removed his attorney general. The interim report by the Senate Judiciary Committee was issued Thursday. While Republicans on the panel offered their counter-findings arguing that Trump did not subvert the justice system to remain in power, the majority report by the Democrats offers the most detailed account to date of the struggle inside the administration’s final, desperate days. On Jan. 3, then-acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue, and a handful of other administration officials met in the Oval Office for what all expected to be a final confrontation on Trump’s plan to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, a little-known Justice Department official who had indicated he would publicly pursue Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud. According to testimony Rosen gave to the committee, Trump opened the meeting by saying, “One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren’t going to do anything to overturn the election.” For three hours, the officials then debated Trump’s plan, and the insistence by Rosen and others that they would resign rather than go along with it. The Senate report says that the top White House lawyer, Pat Cipollone, and his deputy also said they would quit if Trump went through with his plan. During the meeting, Donoghue and another Justice Department official made clear that all of the Justice Department’s assistant attorneys general “would resign if Trump replaced Rosen with Clark,” the report says. “Donoghue added that the mass resignations likely would not end there, and that U.S. Attorneys and other DOJ officials might also resign en masse.” The details of the report were first reported by the New York Times. Leading up to the Jan. 3 meeting, Trump had pressed Rosen in a series of phone calls to pursue false or fanciful claims of voter fraud. Rosen had largely resisted those entreaties, while saying the department would pursue meaningful allegations of fraud.