simply not true. makeso, as he went through them, and one for me was a 90 minute conversation or so, for the former acting ag was a two-hour conversation, as the president went through them, i went piece by piece to say, no, that is false. that is not true. and, to correct him, really, in this serial fashion, as he moved from one theory to another. can you give me an example of one or two of those theories? so, at one that was very clear at that point was the interim county, the report that i mentioned earlier, the security operations group released this report that said 68% error rate. there was in fact a hand recount. at nothing to do it with our department. the department did not request that. that was pursuant to a litigation brought by by the parties. there was a hand recount. they were able to compare the hand recount to what the machines had reported. for the ballots that were actually counted by machine, more than 15, 000, there was
see trump on the screen asking, where is doj, just like we heard in that first television interview. how did you respond to that? so, both the acting ag and i tried to explain to the president on this occasion and on several other occasions that the justice department has a very important, very specific, but very limited role in these elections. states run their elections. we are not quality controlled for the states. we are obviously interested in, and have a mission that pertains to criminal conduct in relation to federal elections. we also have related several rights responsibilities so we do have an important role. but, in the bottom line was, the state run their election in such a way that it wasn t effective, that is, to the state, what congress did correct, is not for the justice department to step in. i certainly understood the president, as a layman, not understanding why the justice
had refused to legitimize trump s election fraud and big lie. during this week s election hearing, doj officials described internet detail detail that s a real meeting in the white house three days before january six, where they told trump that if he installed his loyalist jeffrey clark as acting ag, they would all resigned in mass. i said mister president, we will resign immediately. i m not working one minute for this guy. who i had just declared was completely incompetent. and so, the president immediately turned to mr. angles and he said, steve young wouldn t resign would you? and he said, absolutely i would mister president usually we know. choice and then i said, and we are not the only ones. no one cares we resign. it s even let go, that s fine. it doesn t matter, but i m telling you what s gonna happen, you re gonna lose your partner you entire department leadership. every single able walk out of here, your entire department leadership will walk out within hours. and i don t
of his ilk, are getting any traction with the argument he made at the hearing, that he made in an interview with you, which is anybody who is a fair-minded person watching these in the republican party who was not speaking out and doing what is right is going to have, you know, their conscience to deal with. and it s not just the leaders right now. but then it also goes down to the voters. and that is the ultimate question right now. chris, i want to play more of what former acting deputy attorney general richard donahue said today in his testimony. take a listen. the december 27 conversation was, in my mind, an escalation of the earlier conversations, as the former acting ag indicated, there were a lot of communications that preceded that. as we got later in the month of december, the president became more urgent.
arguable, though, that will be remembered most here from today s hearing was the dramatic, almost cinematic testimony about how the top officials at the justice department tried to stop all of that from happening, down to the very last second. there was a bit of a scramble that afternoon to prepare for the oval office meeting. we had discussed on several occasions the attorney general and i whether we should expand the circle of people who knew what was going on. three of us knew, we also brought heather for canyon in, so that the four of us knew, but none of us aside from jeffrey clark, of course, knew what was going on until late that sunday afternoon and we chose to keep a close hold because we did not want to create a concern or panic in the justice department leadership. but at this point, i asked the acting ag, what else can i do to help prepare for this meeting at the oval office?