Former Trump DOJ official Richard Donoghue has
met with the special counsel's office
Donoghue served as acting deputy attorney general near
the end of Trump's presidency and later testified before the House Jan. 6
committee.
July 25,
2023, 4:55 AM CEST / Updated July 25, 2023, 3:54 PM CEST
By Jonathan
Dienst, Tom Winter and Zoë Richards
Former
senior Justice Department official Richard Donoghue says he has been
interviewed by special counsel Jack Smith’s office, but has not been called to
testify before the federal grand jury investigating Jan. 6 and efforts to
overturn the 2020 election.
Donoghue,
who confirmed the meeting with Smith's office to NBC News on Monday, served as
acting deputy attorney general near the end of the Trump administration. He
later testified before the House Jan. 6 committee that investigated the Capitol
riot.
The special
counsel’s office declined to comment to NBC News.
In his testimony
to the House panel last year, Donoghue said that weeks before the attack on the
Capitol, Trump had urged Justice Department officials, including then-acting
Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, to "just say the election was corrupt and
leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen."
Donoghue
and Rosen told the Jan. 6 committee that they repeatedly rebuffed Trump's
efforts, and that he later threatened to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, an
ally who had drafted a letter casting doubt over the 2020 election results and
urging states to certify slates of fake electors.
Jan. 6
committee's chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called Trump's efforts, as
described by Donoghue at the time, as "a brazen attempt to use the Justice
Department to advance the president’s personal political agenda."
Donoghue
also provided testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, in August 2021, and
was asked about a video circulated after the 2020 election by then White House
chief of staff Mark Meadows that alleged intelligence agencies had used Italian
military satellites to change votes in the election.
“Some of
them were pretty farfetched, as this one was,” Donoghue said, according to a
transcript of the interview. “And when I looked at the video, I think it was
about a 20-minute YouTube video or something like that, it struck me as being
fairly off the wall, in part because it was very conclusory and it did not
really offer evidence.”
Donoghue,
who is now in private practice, called the video “pure insanity” in an email to
Rosen.
The former
president and his allies have repeatedly accused the Biden administration of
weaponizing the Justice Department amid Trump's legal woes, which have resulted
so far in two indictments: one from a New York City grand jury centering on
hush money payments he allegedly made during his 2016 campaign and the other a
federal case stemming from his handling of classified documents after he left
the White House.
Trump said
last week that he had received a letter from Smith informing him he is a target
of an investigation by a federal grand jury looking into the Jan. 6 riot and
efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Jonathan
Dienst
Jonathan
Dienst is chief justice contributor for NBC News and chief investigative
reporter for WNBC-TV in New York.
Tom Winter
Tom Winter
is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and
financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Zoë
Richards
Zoë
Richards is the evening politics reporter for NBC News.
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