Page:CTRL0000034600 - Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021).pdf/11

11 I was on the White Collar Subcommittee, as well as a few others.

So I was very involved in things going on in Washington to begin with, and part of that was just the size of the district, the work that we were doing, and just the ease of me being able to get back and forth to D.C. versus, you know, some of my colleagues who were a little farther away.

So I did that for a time. I got involved in a number of other things in D.C. I was on an MS-13 Working Group, Elder Fraud Task Force, Rule of Law Working Group. And I was these were all positions that I was asked to take on mostly by Attorney General Sessions or DAG Rosenstein, but then, as the AGs and the DAG switched out, that continued once AG Barr started, and he had asked me to come to D.C. on a number of occasions to work on different things.

Nothing really quite seemed right. But, in June of 2020, we, of course, were in the middle of COVID. The operations at the office had slowed down considerably. There was an individual who had been my criminal chief who was serving as the PADAG. I knew that he had gone down there in hopes that he'd be back in New York in a year. I think he was at 14 or 15 months at that point, and I know he was hoping to be able to come back to New York.

There was not a tremendous amount of work in terms of criminal investigations and prosecutions being done in the office at that time, and I thought by going to D.C. that it would be an opportunity for me to get down there, work at Main Justice, and get a better understanding of the organization from that angle.

So, when the AG asked me to go down in June, I thought about it for a day or so, discussed it with my wife, and then told him I would be willing to switch places with Seth DuCharme, who was the PADAG. I would go in as the PADAG, and Seth would come back and get to serve as U.S. attorney.