Jeffrey Rosen, former acting attorney general, testified on June 23 as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack presented its findings to the public.
Rosen told the committee that in the days leading up to Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump
requested in a meeting that top DOJ officials seize voting machines from states and investigate allegations of election fraud. Rosen told the president that would not be possible.
“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 [Department of Homeland Security], and they had briefed us. That they have looked at it and that there was nothing wrong with the voting machines. And so, that was not something that was appropriate to do,” Rosen said.
Richard Donoghue, then-acting deputy attorney, said Trump then called DHS, telling a top agency official that Rosen had said it was the DHS’ job to seize voting machines.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., asked Rosen if this is what he had told Trump.
“No, certainly not,” Rosen said.
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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