justice department on its own terms and today. here s the problem that has just landed in attorney general merrick garland s lap. the problem is that before, in the end, they finally all offered to quit to stop this plot, before they did that, a bunch of them helped in the plot. they didn t just passively observe that this is what trump wanted and this is what trump was pursuing and this is how trump wanted to use the u.s. justice department. they helped him use the justice department to advance this plot up to a point. richard donoghue, the deputy attorney general telling trump, it ll will be bad for you, bad for the country, we will all quit. he looks like a great star. before that, we know he took trump s bat bleep theories about voter fraud, stealing the election from him in multiple states and he sent those trump
because of vacancies at the end of the term, he was only acting civil division chief. and it s a little hard to imagine that he cooked this up on his own or that he would tangle with rosen and donoghue like this on his own, and he landed mighty quickly at a dark money shop called the new civil liberties alliance. i don t know who is paying him to be there. i think there s a bigger story about what s behind this scheme. one school of thought is that this is an ambitious nobody who saw his moment and took a shot at it and got shot down by his peers. equally plausible scenario is that this guy was put up to it, somebody drafted that complex letter involving areas of law in which he had no expertise for him to produce rosen and donoghue, and looking behind what took place at the department of justice, i think, is why this is only an interim report.
clark to give your cellphone number? i do not. do you know anything about mr. clark reaching out to you in any way? yes. he called me and was very frustrated bus president trump was solely focused on georgia and he commented that nothing would dissuede president trump from believing the election was, in fact, stolen from him. he would not believe that he lost georgia. i don t know why. he didn t explain why. and i reiterated to him, and we looked into several allegations. we concluded there was nothing there and this was kind of disturbing because in substance this means his own people looked into it and reported back up. mr. donoghue then asks me if i
where someone at main justice told you the president might contact you directly for an issue? answer, i have not. question, in your experience, would that be unusual for any attorney to hear the president might contact them directly? answer, that would be highly irregular given the fact that it s highly regulated through the office of legal affairs and the front office and the deputy attorney general. question, and in the course of this discussion with rich donoghue, did the two of you develop some plan to deal with mow you would reach out from jeff clark or president trump. answer, no, there was no plan. that plan unsealed today from a man named b.j. pak.
he did here. i as i explained in the intro am struck by the fact that there were other senior justice department officials who were very willing to use the resources of the department to jump down the rabbit holes on trump s behalf, up to and including deputy attorney general mr. donoghue and the attorney general mr. barr, all of whom told u.s. attorneys to chase this stuff down. is that a problem for the justice department in an ongoing way? is that a matter for the inspector general? is that potentially a matter for referral to bar associations? possibly. not all that clear. to the extent that what they were doing was running down allegations of violations of federal law, then that s what the department of justice is there for. to the extent it would be obvious to any person that these were cockamamy allegations to pursue them to the point where