Former acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen has agreed to testify next week before the Jan. 6 committee about former President Donald Trump’s effort to use the Justice Department to illegally stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
Rosen, who was appointed by Trump to replace Bill Barr, will speak in person on Wednesday to the congressional panel about the former president’s effort to get top prosecutors to help push his false narrative that the election was stolen.
His planned appearance was confirmed by Rosen’s law firm in a Friday letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the committee’s chair.
Rosen will appear on a panel with then-Deputy Attorney General Rich Donoghue and Steve Engel, who was head of the DOJ’s office of legal counsel.
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the committee’s vice chair, said the Thursday panel would highlight how Trump hoped to fire Rosen because the career prosecutor refused to go along with his scheme to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
“Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General of the United States so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims,” Cheney said.
She recounted that Rosen and Donoghue rejected Trump’s effort to get the DOJ to open bogus investigations into non-existent claims of voter fraud.
“Men he had appointed told him they could not do that, because it was not true,” said Cheney, a fierce critic of Trump. “So President Trump decided to replace them.”
Rosen earlier testified behind closed doors that Jeffrey Clark, a little-known midlevel environmental prosecutor, touted himself as a supporter of Trump’s false narrative within the DOJ.
Clark created a draft letter to Republican-led legislatures in key battleground states that Trump lost purportedly informing them that the Justice Department was investigating supposed fraud.
Rosen flatly refused to sign it. Donoghue said he told Clark to stick to environmental law. “We’ll call you when there’s an oil spill,” the senior prosecutor said.
Trump hoped to oust Rosen and replace him with Clark in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
But he abandoned the idea after prosecutors and White House lawyers threatened to resign en masse in protest.
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