During a hearing by the House of Representatives committee investigating the Capitol invasion on January 6, 2021, three prominent former officials of the United States Department of Justice reported that then-President Donald Trump pressured the body to declare that fraud had occurred. in the 2020 presidential election.
Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Donoghue and former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of the Legal Counsel Steven Engel told the committee on Thursday that they had threatened to resign over the pressure from the Republican president, defeated by Joe Biden in the election last year.
Donoghue reported that Rosen told Trump at the time that the Justice Department could not simply “snap its fingers” and change the outcome of the presidential election.
“He [Trump] responded very quickly and said, in short, ‘That’s not what I’m asking you to do, what I’m asking you to do is just say that there was corruption. [na eleição] and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,’” Donoghue claimed.
The former attorney added that while the department found “isolated instances of fraud,” “none of them came close to calling into question the election outcome in any particular state.”
The Capitol, home of the US House of Representatives and Senate, was invaded on January 6 of last year by Trump supporters, who alleged fraud in Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. The riot caused five deaths and left dozens injured. . The House of Representatives committee aims to determine responsibility for the incident, including Trump.
On Tuesday (21), several state officials testified before the committee and said that the former president had intimidated election officials in several states to change the outcome of the elections.
One of the witnesses was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump reportedly demanded to find enough votes to overturn the state’s election results, alleging without evidence that Democrats committed fraud.
Raffensperger said his team investigated “every allegation” of election fraud made by Trump and concluded that no wrongdoing had occurred.
Last week, Trump branded members of the committee investigating the Capitol Hill attack as “radical leftists” and called the group’s conclusions about what happened on January 6, 2021, a “total fraud.”
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