Richard Donoghue

On December 14, 2020, President Trump announced via Twitter that Barr would be resigning from his post as attorney general, effective December 23.[11] Barr further confirmed his resignation in a letter to Trump on the same day.[12] It was announced that Jeffrey A. Rosen would become acting Attorney General on December 24, the day after William Barr's resignation took effect.[13][14][15] As a result of the shuffle, Donoghue took the role of Deputy Attorney General.[16]

Alongside Rosen, Donoghue appeared before the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack (also known as the "January 6th Committee") for its fifth public hearing. They testified about the pressure campaign by Trump and surrogates in the days between the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 United States Capitol attack.[17][18] In addition to testimony, Donoghue provided contemporaneous notes memorializing conversations with President Trump. The notes directly quote Trump ordering Donoghue to "just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen."[19][20]

In their accounts, Donoghue and Rosen recounted their dealings with Jeffrey Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General for United States Department of Justice Civil Division who, outside the Department's chain-of-command, pursued several of Trump's false claims of a stolen election on behalf of the Department. On December 28, 2020, Clark emailed Rosen and Donoghue a draft letter which he reportedly had discussed with Perry, requesting they sign it.[21][22] The letter had been emailed to Clark twenty minutes earlier by Ken Klukowski, senior counsel to Clark and a legal analyst for far-right Breitbart News; Klukowski had co-authored a 2010 book titled, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.[23] Klukowski joined the Department of Justice in December 2020, with less than a month left of Trump's term.[21]

The draft letter was addressed to officials in the state of Georgia, saying that the Justice Department had evidence that raised "significant concerns" about the election results in multiple states, contradicting what Barr had publicly announced weeks earlier. The letter suggested the Georgia legislature should "call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors". Both Rosen and Donoghue refused to sign the letter.[24][25]

On Sunday, January 3, 2021, Donoghue was unexpectedly summoned to the Oval Office for a meeting with President Trump. Testifying about the meeting with the January 6 Committee, Donoghue recounted confronting Trump after he implied he could overcome Rosen's resistance to signing the Georgia letter (and attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election more generally) by simply replacing Rosen with Jeff Clark:[26]

The conversation at this point had moved beyond the specific allegations, whether it was State Farm Arena or Antrim County or Pennsylvania or whatever. We had discussed those repeatedly and the converse — that was backdrop to the conversation. But the conversation at this point was really about whether the president should remove Jeff Rosen and replace him with Jeff Clark.

And everyone in the room I think understood that that meant that letter would go out. So, that was the focus. It was about a two and a half hour meeting after I entered. And so, there were discussions about the pros and cons of doing that. Early on, the president said what do I have to lose? And it was actually a good opening because I said, Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose.

And I began to explain to him what he had to lose and what the country had to lose and what the department had to lose, and this was not in anyone's best interest. That conversation went on for some time. Everyone essentially chimed in with their own thoughts, all of which were consistent about how damaging this would be to the country, to the department, to the administration, to him personally.

Asked by Adam Kinzinger to elaborate on the damage, Donoghue replied:[26]

And along those lines, [Trump] said, "So suppose I do this. Suppose I replace him, Jeff Rosen, with him, Jeff Clark? What would you do?"

And I said, "Mr. President, I would resign immediately. I'm not working one minute for this guy," who I had just declared was completely incompetent.

And so, the president immediately turned to — to Mr. Engel. And he said, "Steve, you wouldn't resign, would you?"

And he said "Absolutely I would, Mr. President. You leave me no choice."

And — and then I said, "And we're not the only ones. No one cares if we resign. If Steve and I go, that's fine. It doesn't matter.

"But I'm telling you what's going to happen. You're going to lose your entire department leadership. Every single AAG will walk out on you. Your entire department leadership will walk out within hours. And I don't know what happens after that. I don't know what the United States attorneys are going to do. We have US attorneys in districts across the country, and my guess would be that many of them would have resigned."

And that would then have led to resignations across the department in Washington.

And I said, "Mr. President, within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions. What's that going to say about you?"

Donoghue recalled that Trump then declined to move forward on the replacement of Rosen with Clark. He did not, however, fire Jeffrey Clark.[26][27]