Jan. 6
Panel Hearings
5 Takeaways From Thursday’s Hearing by the Jan. 6
Committee
Michael S.
Schmidt
June 23,
2022, 7:25 p.m. ETJune 23, 2022
June 23,
2022
Michael S.
Schmidt
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/politics/jan-6-hearling-takeaways.html
As President Donald J. Trump searched for any way to
substantiate false election fraud claims, he also tried to install a loyalist
as a special counsel to investigate them.
The House
committee’s fifth hearing focused on President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to
harness the powers of the Justice Department to remain in office. Relying on
testimony of three former top Justice Department officials who played central
roles in the episode, the committee laid out in detail how Mr. Trump and his
allies in the department and on Capitol Hill sought to install a loyalist atop
the Justice Department and reverse the election results from a key swing state.
Here are five key takeaways.
It was the
most blatant attempt to use the Justice Department for political ends at least
since Watergate.
Mr. Trump
aggressively pursued a plan to install as acting attorney general a
little-known Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to
take actions to reverse the election results. As they fought to head off the
move, a group of White House lawyers and the leadership of the Justice
Department feared that the plan was so ill-conceived and dishonest that it
would have spiraled the country into a constitutional crisis if it had
succeeded.
The
president came so close to appointing Mr. Clark that the White House had
already begun referring to him as the acting attorney general in call logs from
Jan. 3, 2021. Later that day, Mr. Trump had a dramatic Oval Office showdown
with top Justice Department officials and White House lawyers, who told Mr.
Trump that there would be a “graveyard” at the Justice Department if he
appointed Mr. Clark because so many top officials would resign.
The House Jan. 6 committee painted a picture of how
President Donald J. Trump schemed to pressure the Justice Department into
overturning the 2020 election.
In the
meeting, Mr. Trump chastised the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, for
refusing to do more to help him find election fraud. Only after hours of
argument — partly about the lack of substance behind Mr. Trump’s claims of
election fraud but also about the political ramifications for him if he took
action that led to the exodus of top Justice Department officials — did Mr.
Trump relent and back off his plan to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.
The heart
of the scheme was a draft letter to officials in Georgia.
At the
center of the plan was a letter drafted by Mr. Clark and another Trump loyalist
that they hoped to send to state officials in Georgia. The letter falsely
asserted that the department had evidence of election fraud that could lead the
state to rethink its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory there. The
letter recommended that the state call its legislature into session to study
allegations of election fraud and consider naming an alternate slate of
electors pledged to Mr. Trump.
The
department’s top officials and Mr. Trump’s legal team in the White House were
all appalled by the letter because it would be giving the imprimatur of the
nation’s top law enforcement agencies to claims of election fraud that the
department had repeatedly investigated and found baseless. The letter was so
outrageous that a top White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, testified that he
told Mr. Clark that if he became attorney general and sent the letter he would
be committing a felony.
The Justice
Department’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, testified at
the hearing that sending it would have been tantamount to the Justice
Department intervening in the outcome of the election.
Trump would
not give up on his claims of fraud.
Time after
time, the White House brought baseless and sometimes preposterous claims of
election fraud — including internet conspiracy theories — to Justice Department
officials so that they could use the nation’s law enforcement powers to
investigate them. And time after time, the department and the F.B.I. found the
claims had no validity.
The pattern
became so extraordinary that at one point the White House chief of staff, Mark
Meadows, sent a YouTube video to department officials from Representative Scott
Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, that claimed an Italian defense contractor
uploaded software to a satellite that switched votes from Mr. Trump.
A top
Defense Department official, Kashyap Patel, followed up with Mr. Donoghue about
the claim, and the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, reached out
to a defense attaché in Italy to discuss the claim, which was never
substantiated.
About 90
minutes after Mr. Donoghue had helped persuade Mr. Trump not to install Mr.
Clark as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump would still not let go, calling Mr.
Donoghue on his cellphone with another request: to look into a report that an
immigration and customs agent in Georgia had seized a truck full of shredded
ballots. There turned out to be nothing to it, Mr. Donoghue testified.
Trump
considered naming a loyalist lawyer as a special counsel.
As Mr. Trump
searched for any way to substantiate the false fraud claims, he tried to
install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them. One of Mr. Trump’s
personal lawyers, Sidney Powell — who had become a public face of Mr. Trump’s
attempts to overturn the election — said in testimony played by the committee
that Mr. Trump discussed with her the possibility of taking on that position in
December.
The
committee also played testimony of William P. Barr, who was attorney general
until the middle of December 2020, saying that there was no basis to appoint a
special counsel. And the committee suggested that the idea was part of the
larger effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory and open
the door to Congress considering alternate slates of Trump electors from swing
states.
“So let’s
think here, what would a special counsel do?” said Representative Adam
Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, who led the day’s questioning. “With only
days to go until election certification, it wasn’t to investigate anything. An
investigation, led by a special counsel, would just create an illusion of
legitimacy and provide fake cover for those who would want to object, including
those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
Mr.
Kinzinger added: “All of President Trump’s plans for the Justice Department
were being rebuffed.”
Making a
case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears
to be laying out evidence that could
allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path
to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so
far:
An
unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in
vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the
former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of
the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a
Capitol Police officer.
Creating
election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored
aides and advisers as he declaredg victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed
claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if
he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general,
said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.
Pressuring
Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along
with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal,
according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The
committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the
Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.
Fake
elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was
personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also
presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials
to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.
Strong
arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr.
Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to
keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a
dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.
Members of
Congress sought pardons — and Trump considered the requests.
In the days
after Jan. 6, several of Mr. Trump’s political allies on Capitol Hill, who had
helped stoke the false election claims and efforts to overturn the results,
sought pardons from Mr. Trump, who considered granting them, according to testimony
on Thursday.
Among those
looking for a pardon was Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida. Mr.
Gaetz was seeking a blanket pardon that would have essentially covered any
crime he had committed in his entire life. Although it was not known publicly
at the time, Mr. Gaetz was under Justice Department investigation for paying a
17-year-old girl for sex.
“The
general tone was, ‘We may get prosecuted because we were defensive of, you
know, the president’s positions on these things,’” Mr. Herschmann, the White
House lawyer, said in a video clip of his testimony. “The pardon that he was
requesting was as broad as you could describe. I remember he said ‘from the
beginning of time up until today. For any and all things.’”
“Nixon’s
pardon was never nearly that broad,” Mr. Herschmann recalled saying at the time
in response to the request.
A slew of
other allies asked for them. Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama,
sent an email to the White House seeking so called pre-emptive pardons for all
House and Senate members who had voted to reject the Electoral College vote
certifications of Mr. Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
A former
aide to Mr. Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that several other
Republican House members expressed interest in pardons, including Mr. Perry and
Representatives Louie Gohmert of Texas and Andy Biggs of Arizona.
Ms.
Hutchinson said she had also heard that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
of Georgia had reached out to the White House Counsel’s Office about a pardon.
Mr. Trump
“had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s
former head of presidential personnel, John McEntee, testified.
Mr.
Kinzinger suggested that the pardon requests were evidence that Mr. Trump’s
allies had consciousness of guilt.
“The only
reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a
crime,” he said.
Chris
Cameron contributed reporting.
Michael S.
Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal
investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of
President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike
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