Page:Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/36

 One of those conversations occurred on December 27th, when Trump called Rosen to go through a “stream of allegations” about the election. Donoghue described that call as an “escalation of the earlier conversations” they had. Initially, Trump called Rosen directly. When Donoghue joined the call, he sought to “make it clear to the President [that] these allegations were simply not true.” "So [the President] went through [the allegations] – in what for me was a 90-minute conversation or so, and what for the former Acting AG was a 2-hour conversation – as the President went through them I went piece by piece to say “no, that’s false, that is not true,” and to correct him really in a serial fashion as he moved from one theory to another."

The President raised, among others, debunked claims about voting machines in Michigan, a truck driver who allegedly moved ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, and a purported election fraud at the State Farm Arena in Georgia. None of the allegations were credible, and Rosen and Donoghue said so to the President.

At one point during the December 27th call in which Donoghue refuted Trump’s fraud allegations, Donoghue recorded in handwritten notes a request Trump made specifically to him and Acting Attorney General Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” Donoghue explained: “[T]he Department had zero involvement in anyone’s political strategy,” and “he wanted us to say that it was corrupt.” “We told him we were not going to do that.” At the time, neither Rosen nor Donoghue knew the full extent to which Republican Congressmen, including Representative Scott Perry, were attempting to assist Trump to overturn the election results.

The Committee’s investigation has shown that Congressman Perry was working with one Department of Justice official, Jeffrey Clark, regarding the stolen election claims. Perry was working with Clark and with President Trump and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows with this goal: to enlist Clark to reverse the Department of Justice’s findings regarding the election and help overturn the election outcome.

After introducing Jeffrey Clark to the President, Perry sent multiple text messages to Meadows between December 26th and December 28th, pressing that Clark be elevated within the Department. Perry reminded Meadows that there are only “11 days to 1/6…We gotta get going!,” and, as the days went on, one asking, “Did you call Jeff Clark?”

Acting Attorney General Rosen first learned about Clark’s contact with Trump in a call on Christmas Eve. On that call, President Trump mentioned Clark to Rosen, who was surprised to learn that Trump knew Clark and had met with him. Rosen later confronted Clark about the contact: “Jeff, anything going on that you think I should know about?” Clark didn’t “immediately volunteer” the fact that he had met with the President, but ultimately “acknowledged that he had been at a meeting with the President in the Oval Office, not alone, with other people.” Clark was “kind of defensive” and “somewhat apologetic,” “casting it as that he had had a meeting with Congressman Perry from Pennsylvania and that, to his surprise, or, you know, he hadn’t anticipated it, that they somehow wound up at a meeting in the Oval Office.” Clark’s contact with Trump violated both Justice Department and White House policies designed to prevent political pressure on the Department.

While Clark initially appeared apologetic and assured Rosen that “[i]t won’t happen again,” he nevertheless continued to work and meet secretly with Trump and Congressman