support Trump's theory that the election was stolen by fraud. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his Deputy repeatedly reinforced to President Trump that his claims of election fraud were false when they took over in mid-December. Also in mid-December 2020, Attorney General Barr announced his plans to resign. Between that time and January 6th, Trump spoke with Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and Acting Deputy Richard Donoghue repeatedly, attempting to persuade them and the Department of Justice to find factual support for his stolen election claims and thereby to assist his efforts to reverse election results.
As Rosen publicly testified, "… between December 23rd and January 3rd, the President either called me or met with me virtually every day, with one or two exceptions, like Christmas Day."[267] As discussed earlier, Justice Department investigations had demonstrated that the stolen election claims were false; both Rosen and Donoghue told President Trump this comprehensively and repeatedly.
One of those conversations occurred on December 27th, when President Trump called Rosen to go through a "stream of allegations" about the election.[268] Donoghue described that call as an "escalation of the earlier conversations" they had.[269] Initially, President Trump called Rosen directly. When Donoghue joined the call, he sought to "make it clear to the President [that] these allegations were simply not true."[270]
So [the President] went through [the allegations]—in what for me was a 90-minute conversation or so, and what for the former Acting AG was a 2-hour conversation—as the President went through them I went piece by piece to say "no, that's false, that is not true," and to correct him really in a serial fashion as he moved from one theory to another.[271]
The President raised, among others, debunked claims about voting machines in Michigan, a truck driver who allegedly moved ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, and a purported election fraud at the State Farm Arena in Georgia.[272] None of the allegations were credible, and Rosen and Donoghue said so to the President.[273]
At one point during the December 27th call in which Donoghue refuted President Trump's fraud allegations, Donoghue recorded in handwritten notes a request President Trump made specifically to him and Acting Attorney General Rosen: "Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen."[274] Donoghue explained: "[T]he Department had zero involvement in anyone's political strategy," and "he wanted us to say that it was corrupt."[275] "We told him we were not going to do that."[276] At the time, neither Rosen nor Donoghue knew the full extent
