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

Former DOJ officials described how they resisted Trump's relentless pressure.

Thursday's hearing of the Jan. 6 committee focused on the pressure then-President Donald Trump and his allies put on the Justice Department to help overturn the 2020 election.


0

Cheney: Public to hear about members of Congress who sought pardons

Vice-chair Liz Cheney focused her opening statement Thursday on teasing a draft letter that Trump and former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark wanted the department to send to Georgia officials citing already disproven allegations of fraud.

"As you will see, this letter claims that the U.S. Department of Justice's investigations have 'identified significant concerns hat may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the state of Georgia,'" Cheney said. "In fact, Donald Trump knew this was a lie. The Department of Justice had already informed the president of the United States repeatedly that its investigations had found no fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the 2020 election."

ABC News obtained and published the draft letter in full last year. Read it here.

Cheney also said the public today will see video testimony by three members of Trump's White House staff identifying certain members of Congress who contacted the White House after Jan. 6 to "seek presidential pardons for their conduct."


Chair convenes hearing on Trump's 'brazen attempt' to pressure DOJ

Three former top officials in the Justice Department -- former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, former deputy acting attorney general Richard Donoghue and former top DOJ lawyer Steven Engel -- sat before lawmakers Thursday as Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., convened the fifth public hearing this month.

"Today, we'll tell the story of how the pressure campaign also targeted the federal agency charged with enforcement of our laws, the Department of Justice," Thompson said, going to call it "a brazen attempt to use the Justice Department to advance the president's professional and personal agenda."

All three witnesses are expected to detail how they resisted Trump and his allies' repeated entreaties to enlist the Justice Department in his failed bid to overturn his election loss.


Rep. Adam Kinzinger to lead hearing

Rep. Adam Kinzinger will lead questioning in today’s hearing, committee aides confirmed to reporters. Kinzinger is one of the two Republicans on the nine-member committee.

"The threat to our democracy is real. And today, we'll see just how close we came to losing it all," Kinzinger tweeted ahead of the hearing. "Tune in as we uncover President Trump’s pressure campaign on [the Justice Department] in his desperate attempt to subvert the will of the people to stay in power."


Filmmaker with new Trump footage sits for deposition

British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder sat for a deposition with the committee earlier Thursday after a subpoena commanded him to turn over documentary footage -- never-seen publicly -- filmed for a series on Trump's final months in office.

"I have no further comment at this time other than to say that our conversation today was thorough and I appreciated the opportunity to share more context about my project," Holder said in a statement to ABC News.

Holder was "given unparalleled access and exclusive interviews with President Trump, Ivanka, Eric, and Don Jr., Jared Kushner as well as Vice President Pence; in the White House, Mar-A-Lago, behind-the-scenes on the campaign trail, and before and after the events of January 6th," according to a statement from his spokesperson.

He received a subpoena last Thursday from the committee to turn over footage shot for his documentary series and submitted the materials requested earlier this week.

-ABC News Ali Dukakis


Inside GOP Rep. Scott Perry's role in the DOJ pressure campaign

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