Page:CTRL0000034600 - Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021).pdf/17

17 Okay. When you sent it out, Mr. Donoghue, just looking at your email, you say, "While we are living in distracting times, it is imperative that we ignore the noise and remain focused on the responsibilities in our respective lanes and that we keep our teams doing the same."

Just share with us what you mean—what you meant when you said we're living in distracting times and that we need to ignore the noise and remain focused on our responsibilities.

So, as I said, there was a tremendous amount of churn following the election, certainly leading up to the election, but we had hoped that that would calm down after the election. That was not the case. So there was a lot of noise about the election. There was a lot of noise about whether the results of the election were reliable.

We have some responsibilities with regard to that, but really only a small subset when you look at the whole picture. So I just wanted the people in the Department to continue working on the things that we work on day in, day out without being distracted by the political drama that was playing out.

Did you get any feedback from recipients of the email that you remember?

I don't remember. I might have, but I don't remember.

Okay. And then, to be clear, there is really two attached documents. There's one that's dated May 11th of 2009, signed by then-Attorney General Holder, and then a second, January 27th, 2017, that the White House version that is from then-White House Counsel McGahn, and they essentially say the same thing. Is that right?

Yeah, they parallel one another to limit the communications from both ends.

Yeah. Reading from page 2 of the 2009 document at the very top, it says: