Page:CTRL0000034600 - Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021).pdf/107

107 because there was nothing new here. There was nothing that he was bringing up that we hadn't previously been aware of. If we had, you know, perhaps I would've taken out a pen and paper, but that was just not the situation.

Did the President or anyone else in the White House ever tell you that you should not take notes when you were in meetings with him or in the Oval Office?

No, there were no instructions along those lines.

All right.

Did the President, during this meeting, talk again about Jeff Clark or the possibility of a leadership change at the Department?

He did at the end. He reiterated that people were advising him to remove both DAG Rosen and me. And we just repeated what we had said previously, that if you're uncomfortable with your leadership, you should have the leaders that you want, but it's really not going to change anything.

All right.

Was there any discussion of the Supreme Court complaint and the OLC opinion about standing? Do you know whether that specifically came up?

Yes, that definitely came up.

All right. And tell us again, quickly, what the discussion was with respect to the President and his understanding of the standing issue.

So the President brought up again that some of these cases—in his view, virtually all the cases were being dismissed on standing grounds and that if the Department brought a case it would not be dismissed on standing grounds, because the Department represents the American people, and the American people had standing because they were being harmed by corrupt or defective elections.

And so we tried to explain to him that, in fact, the Department does not have