Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., opened the questioning of former Justice Department officials on June 23 as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack presented its findings to the public.
Thompson said that though former Attorney General Bill Barr had refuted claims of election fraud directly to Trump, the former president continued to press Department of Justice officials after Barr resigned in December 2020.
Jeffrey Rosen, who became acting attorney general after Barr’s resignation, said he met with Trump almost every day, over several days, to discuss his false allegations of election fraud.
“Between Dec. 23 and Jan. 3, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day – with one or two exceptions, like Christmas Day,” Rosen said, adding that a throughline through all his conversations at that time with Trump was the former president “expressing his dissatisfaction that the justice department, in his view, had not done enough to investigate election fraud.”
“But at different junctures, other topics came up at different intervals,” Rosen said. “At one point, he had raised the question of having a special counsel for election fraud. At a number of points, he raised requests that I meet with his campaign counsel, Mr. [Rudy] Giuliani. At one point, he raised whether the Justice Department would file a lawsuit in the Supreme Court,” he added.
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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