High drama as Jan. 6 hearing details Trump's effort to corrupt Justice Department

While discussing whether to fire a top official in the Department of Justice in a 2.5 hour meeting at the Oval Office on Jan. 3, 2021, Trump turned to officials in the room and asked them a question, former deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue testified Thursday.

"What do I have to lose?" Trump asked, according to Donoghue.

"It was actually a good opening," Donoghue said. "And I began to explain to him what he had to lose, and what the county had to lose and what department had to lose, and this was not in anyone's best interest."

Donoghue said no one in the room supported Jeffrey Clark taking over as the department's top official, describing him to the president as unqualified. Clark at the time was a Trump-appointed Justice Department official overseeing the department's Civil Division and environmental enforcement matters.

According to call logs displayed by the committee, the White House had already begun referring to Jeffrey Clark as "acting attorney general" on Jan. 3, 2021 -- despite Jeff Rosen, who wouldn't fall in line with election fraud conspiracies, actually serving as acting attorney general.

Trump also met with the aforementioned officials in the Oval Office on Jan. 3, and said, according to Rosen, "'Well the one thing we know is you're not gonna do anything. You don't even agree that the concerns that are being presented are valid. And here is someone who has a different view, so, why shouldn't I do that?'"

Former deputy acting attorney general Richard Donoghue recalled asking attorney generals across the country what they would do if Clark was put in charge.

"All essentially said they would leave," he told the panel. "They would resign en masse if the president made that change in the department leadership."

A hard-right conservative member of the House and leader of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn., has been one of Trump's most loyal supporters in Congress.

As the Jan. 6 committee laid out Thursday, that support continued after the 2020 election, when he was among the Republicans who met with Trump at the White House on Dec. 21, 2020, on how to continue challenging Joe Biden's victory and push claims of voter fraud.

The next day, Perry introduced Jeffery Clark to Trump in a White House meeting. Clark did not work on election issues at the Justice Department, and he met with the president without the knowledge of his superiors in violation of DOJ rules.

"So, for criminal matters, the policy for a long time has been the only the attorney general in the deputy attorney general from the DOJ side can have ... conversations with the White House," Jeffrey Rosen, the then-acting attorney general, told the committee.

Why was Clark recommended? Here's how Rudy Giuliani explained it, in his recorded interview with the committee: “I do recall saying to people that somebody should be put in charge of the Justice Department who isn't frightened of what is going to be done to their reputation.”

Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, said Perry wanted Clark to "take over" the Justice Department, and pushed Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff and his former House colleague, to make it happen.

-ABC News' Benjamin Siegel

Former top Justice Department officials recalled being sent a 20-minute video on a far-right election conspiracy theory alleging Italy facilitated election interference, which former deputy acting attorney general Richard Donoghue called "patently absurd."

"I emailed the acting attorney general and said, 'pure insanity.' That was my impression of the video, which was patently absurd," he said.

The committee showed with texts how Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn., whom Vice Chair Liz Cheney said in the first June hearing sought a presidential pardon from the White House in the days following the Jan. 6 attack, texted the conspiracy theory involving Italy to former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

"The select committee confirmed that a call was actually placed by Secretary [of Defense Chris] Miller to the attaché in Italy to investigate the claim that Italian satellites were switching votes from Trump to Biden. This is one of the best examples of the leaks to which President Trump would go to stay in power," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.