Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., asked the former DOJ officials testifying ahead of the Jan. 6 House committee on June 23 about a request from former President Donald Trump to seize voting machines from state governments. He asked if Trump threatened to remove them for not investigating election fraud like he asked.
“We had seen nothing improper with regard to the voting machines, and I told him that the real experts at that had been at DHS and had briefed us that they had looked at it and that there was nothing wrong with the voting machines. And so that was not something that was appropriate to do,” Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told the committee.
Kinzinger also brought up a debunked conspiracy theory about votes being switched by an Italian satellite, a baseless claim that DOJ officials were asked to investigate. Former top DOJ official Richard Donoghue testified that he had described the conspiracy theory as “absurd.” And yet, Kinzinger said, former chief of staff Mark Meadows continued to discuss the conspiracy theory in the White House.
The hearing, the fifth of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee, focused on Trump’s pressure on the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.
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