Facts: The committee hearings and the attack on the Capitol
The hearings in the House of Representatives are chaired by a committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans.
The interrogations are broadcast live and have attracted millions of viewers in the United States.
On January 6, 2021, the members of the US Congress gathered in the Capitol to count the electoral votes of the presidential election and formally nominate the Democrat Joe Biden as the election winner and the next president.
In the capital Washington DC, tens of thousands of supporters of Donald Trump had also gathered for a political rally on the theme “Save America”. At the meeting, Trump reiterated his claims of systematic electoral fraud and claimed that he was the real winner. He urged his supporters to go to Congress:
“If you do not fight in hell, you will not have a country anymore,” said the then president.
Parts of the crowd did as he said. The protests turned violent when hundreds of people stormed the congress building and clashed with police. Some went as far as President Nancy Pelosi’s office, as well as into one of the chambers. Parts of the building were vandalized.
Five people, including a police officer, lost their lives in the attack.
– Donald Trump did not just want the Department of Justice to investigate. He wanted the Department of Justice to help him legitimize his lies, said committee chairman Bennie Thompson.
When it came time for the fifth day of the congressional hearing, the focus was on ex-President Trump’s attempt to refurnish the Justice Department in order to try to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
Contacted daily
Several people who worked in the ministry during the post-election hearing were heard, including the then Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who states that between the end of December 2020 and the beginning of January 2021, Trump contacted him almost daily.
“On one occasion, he raised the issue of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate election fraud,” Rosen said, adding that Trump was also considering having the Justice Department file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court.
The ministry tried to investigate a number of Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud, but without finding any evidence, according to Rosen.
Wanted to kick Rosen
When Trump did not get his way, he turned instead to the then basically unknown Jeffrey Clark, who had a medium-sized position in the Ministry of Justice.
Clark was much more sympathetic to the ex-president’s conspiracy theories and, according to Rosen, has, among other things, prepared a letter to Georgia’s state assembly in which he falsely claimed that the Ministry of Justice had found evidence of widespread electoral fraud.
Since Trump did not get his will through with Rosen, he instead tried to fire Rosen from the post of Minister of Justice and replace him with his new favorite.
Warned Clark
But the attempt failed when Rosen, then-Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and several other top names at a White House meeting on January 4, 2021, threatened to resign en masse and take “hundreds” of federal prosecutors with them.
– I pointed out that Jeffrey Clarke does not have the skills required to be Minister of Justice at all. He has never dealt with criminal law. He has never led a criminal investigation, says Donoghue.
He also says he was Clark because his attempt to go ahead with Trump’s false claims “means nothing less than the US Department of Justice interfering in the outcome of a presidential election”.
According to Donoghue, Trump also once told him that the ministry would “say the election was rigged and leave the rest to me.”
Jeffrey Clark did not attend the hearings with reference to the paragraph, commonly referred to as the Fifth Amendment, which gives a person the right to refuse to testify if it may be compromising to the person concerned.