justice department had not done enough. thank you. from the time you took over from attorney general barr until january 3, how often did president trump contact you or the department to push allegations of election fraud? so between december 23 and january 3, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day with one or two exceptions like christmas day. before that because it had been announced that i would become the acting attorney general before the date i did, the president had asked that rich donoghue and i go over and meet with him, i believe, december 15 as well. so after you had some of these meetings and conversations with the president, what things did the president raise with you? so the common element of all
out is that we ve known about it for some time. we ve heard about subpoenas before asking about these electors. but before it was lower level republicans who were set to serve as republican electors but after trump lost the election in those states, they decided some of them that they weren t going to show up, some were sick, they didn t go. those people were contacted. now we have new people contacted that were electors in various states in this criminal probe. jim and poppy? thank you so much for laying that all out for us because a lot happened overnight on that front. let s bring in jeffrey toobin. talking about today, you ve got these former doj officials, jeffrey rosen, richard donoghue testifying in a few hour, both refused to give into trump s efforts to get the doj to push his election lies and fraud claims. i wonder what the current doj will be listening for in this. well, what the committee has done is really in an orderly way
actions, and today that will focus on the justice department in which we ve heard some nip p snip spets of testimony. and we ll hear from three key officials, jeffrey rosen, former acting attorney general near the end of the trump administration as well as rich donoghue who was acting deputy attorney general. and then stephen engel, another senior official in the justice department, all going to make the same case that they stood up to donald trump, they pushed back against his claims but yet the president pressed on ultimately leading to the violence that happened january 6. we have obtained a copy of jeffrey rosen s opening statement, a written statement that he has committed to the committee. he says in part some argue to the former president in public that the election was corrupt and stolen. that view was wrong then and it
vote on the 6th of january. today is the day america patriots start taking down names and kicks ass. mr. donoghue, december 27th, you had a 90-minute conversation with the president where he raised false claim after false claim with you and mr. rosen. how did you respond to what you called a stream of allegations? the december 27th conversation was in my mind an escalation of the earlier conversations as the former acting a.g. indicated there were a lot of communications that preceded that. as we got later in the month of december, the president became more urgent and adamant that we needed to do our job. step up and do our job. he had this arsenal of allegations that he wanted to rely on. so i felt in that conversation
to state legislatures in georgia or other states. so there were different things raised at different parts of different intervals with a common theme being the dissatisfaction about what the justice department had done to investigate election fraud. i will say that the justice department declined all of those requests that i was just referencing because we did not think that they were appropriate based on the facts and the law as we understood them. so mr. donoghue, december 15, the day after attorney general barr announced his resignation, the president summoned you and mr. rosen to the white house. at this meeting with the president, what did he want to discuss. there were a number of topics of discussion that day,