Jan. 6 Committee Delays Testimony Of Official Who Tried To Help Trump Overturn Election

Jeffrey Clark wanted to open a voter fraud investigation even after top Justice Department officials had found that there was no widespread fraud to probe.
Tear gas is fired at supporters of President Trump who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Tear gas is fired at supporters of President Trump who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

WASHINGTON ― The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has postponed Friday’s scheduled under-oath deposition of the former Justice Department official whom Donald Trump had wanted to install as attorney general to help him overturn his 2020 presidential election loss.

Jeffrey Clark had been told to come provide closed-door testimony Friday in the subpoena the committee issued earlier this month, but that was postponed “briefly,” according to a committee aide, to accommodate Clark’s hiring of a new lawyer.

Clark did not respond to HuffPost queries, but Politico reported that Clark’s initial lawyer recently left him.

The Oct. 13 subpoena cited a Senate Judiciary Committee report detailing how Clark violated both department policy and the department’s leadership by contacting Trump and working to help him discredit Democrat Joe Biden’s election win.

“You proposed that the department send a letter to state legislators in Georgia and other states suggesting that they delay certification of their election results and hold a press conference announcing that the department was investigating allegations of voter fraud,” the subpoena stated.

Trump had wanted to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who did not want to participate in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, with Clark, who did. Trump did not do so, though, after Rosen and other top Justice Department officials, as well as senior White House lawyers, threatened to resign en masse.

“While he did not ultimately make that personnel change, your efforts risked involving the Department of Justice in actions that lacked evidentiary foundation and threatened to subvert the rule of law,” the subpoena stated.

Clark had run the Environment and Natural Resources Division at Justice, a Senate-confirmed position, for most of Trump’s term in office, and a year ago he became the acting head of the department’s Civil Division. He resigned from the department on Jan. 14, eight days after the attack on the Capitol that Trump had incited.

Trump became the first president in 232 years of U.S. elections to refuse to turn over power peacefully to his successor.

He spent weeks attacking the legitimacy of the Nov. 3 contest he lost, starting his lies in the predawn hours of Nov. 4 that he had really won reelection in a “landslide” and that his victory was being “stolen” from him. Those falsehoods continued through a long string of failed lawsuits challenging the results in a handful of states.

Trump and some of his advisers even discussed using the U.S. military by invoking the Insurrection Act or by declaring martial law to retain power despite having lost the election, including by seizing voting machines and ordering “re-votes” in states narrowly won by Biden.

But military leaders had earlier made it clear they would not involve themselves in the political process, so after the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, making Biden’s win official, Trump turned to a last-ditch scheme to pressure his own vice president into canceling the ballots of millions of voters in several states Biden won and declaring Trump the winner during the pro forma congressional certification of the election results on Jan. 6.

Trump asked his followers to come to Washington that day for a rally, where he told the tens of thousands of supporters who showed up to march on the Capitol to intimidate Mike Pence into doing what Trump wanted. “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules,” Trump said.

The mob of supporters he incited attempted to do his bidding by storming the building. Many even chanted “Hang Mike Pence” after the vice president refused to comply with Trump’s demands.

A police officer died after being assaulted during the insurrection, and four others took their own lives in the days and weeks that followed. One of the rioters was fatally shot as she climbed through a broken window into an anteroom containing still-evacuating House members, and three others in the crowd died during the melee.

Although the House impeached Trump for inciting the attack, all but seven Senate Republicans, led by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, chose not to convict him ― thereby letting Trump continue his political career even as faces several investigations into his postelection actions.

Trump and his allies are now engaged in a campaign to portray the rioter who was shot, Ashli Babbitt, as a martyr and the hundreds of others who have been arrested as victims of political persecution. Trump continues to suggest he will run for the 2024 GOP nomination for president and is using his Save America committee’s money to continue spreading the same falsehoods that culminated in the violence of Jan. 6.

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