abe assassinated during a campaign speech by a man with a homemade gun. and a new report shows the u.s. jobs market stayed strong last month despite high inflation and recession fears. this hour what the numbers could mean for the u.s. economy and for the biden administration. welcome to our viewers here in the united states and around the world. i m wolf blitzer. you are in the situation room. we begin this hour with a highly anticipated testimony of former white house counsel pat cipollone to the house select committee investigating the january 6th insurrection. let s go straight to capitol hill. our reporter melanie is on the story for us. what do we know, first of all, about the testimony of this key witness? do we know if cipollone has been cooperating or not? reporter: well, pat cipollone has been testifying for eight hours and counting now behind closed doors and he has left several times throughout the course of the day to meet with his own down in separate side
machines, declare the election corrupt and investigate conspiracy claims. watch. between december 23rd and january 3rd, the president either called me or met with me virtually every day. you also noted that mr. rosen said to mr. trump, quote, doj can t and won t snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election, how did the president respond to that, sir? he responded very quickly and said, essentially, that s not what i m asking you to do, what i m just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the republican congressmen. just say it was corrupt. we also learned that when top doj officials refused to back his false election claims, trump wanted to install a little known doj environmental attorney and trump loyalist jeffrey clark as the acting attorney general. just hours before yesterday s hearing, federal agents raided clark s home. we ll have much more on the details of that in a moment. let s begin with cnn political correspond
department if donald trump replaced rosen with jeffrey clark, that loyalist who was there to help him overturn the election. jeffrey clark, former justice department official, whose home was just searched by federal investigators. the committee says it s going to take us inside a heated oval office meeting on january 3rd when today s witnesses confronted trump over his threat to put clark in charge of the justice department until trump eventually backed down. playing a leading role in today s hearing, congressman adam kinzinger of illinois, one of only two republicans on the panel. all this comes after the select committee deposed filmmaker alex holder behind closed doors this morning about his documentary, which features never-before-seen interviews with trump and me members of his inner circle, both before and after january 6th. cnn has gotten first look at the documentary. we ve been sharing some of these key clips. as the committee is about to focus on jeffrey clark, let
the january 6th hearing today. our continuing coverage along with our panel of parts, who i m going bring in in a moment. but what s going on today is another set of break-throughs in this set of hearings, include people naming names. we re learning which specific republican lawmakers were literally asking for last-minute pardons for their own conduct. the focus today is how the committee laid out this new evidence of donald trump s efforts to get people installed and promoted within the department of justice to carry out a coup. three doj officials testifying about what they did, including a tense oval office meeting with resignations with that coup plot moved forward. this was happening in the hairy days before january 6th and drew on testimony both live and in these video taped depositions like you see here. jeffrey clark, more on his liam problems in a moment, was the one that was going to be bodying up to take over the justice department for the explicit purpose of layin