ended.
Q So, after the meeting, you felt the need to notify Steve Engel of the conversation. Is that right?
A Correct.
Q Tab 12 is an email that you send at 11:41 that night, Mr. Donoghue, to Mr. Engel where you say: Please come to my office so I can read you into some antics that could potentially end up on your radar.
Tell me what you meant when you told Mr. Engel about antics and things that could potentially end up in―and, again, Mr. Engel is the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, OLC, at the time. Why did you feel it necessary to loop him in?
A When AG Barr left and Acting AG Rosen took over, we changed the meeting schedule a little bit. And we started having 9 a.m. meetings with different staff members in DAG Rosen's conference room. Steve was one of the people who was invited to the meeting every day. Other people rotated.
If you look at the chain of succession within the Department, it goes through a list of people who become the Acting Attorney General in the absence of people above them on the list. When you go through that list, you remove anyone who is in an acting position.
So, for instance, the Solicitor General is fairly high on that list. But because the Solicitor General had left, there was an Acting Solicitor General; you remove that person from the list. And, when you go down that list, you see that if the President or―well, I'll say if the President fired Acting AG Rosen, the next person to move into the Acting AG seat, absent some other action by the President, would be Steve Engel. Steve was the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General in charge of OLC.
And so I had a concern at this point that there could be an immediate leadership
