Thursday, March 28

Jan. 6 committee postpones Wednesday hearing


The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has postponed its Wednesday hearing slated to review former President Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to investigate his unfounded claims of election fraud.

In an advisory, the committee said its scheduled hearing on Thursday would still take place but provided no other details.

Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue and Steven Engle, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, were all expected to appear before the committee on Wednesday.

“There’s no big deal, but I’ll tell you the putting together the video and exhibits is an exhausting exercise for our very small video staff. So we’re trying to — we were going to have 1-2-3 in one week and it’s just it’s too much to put it all together. So we’re trying to give them a little room to do their technical work, is mainly it,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), one of the committee’s members, said on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Tuesday.

Rosen and Donoghue were some of the committee’s earliest witnesses to voluntarily testify before the panel’s investigators and also spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee for a report it released in October.

“In our third hearing, you will see that President Trump corruptly planned to replace the attorney general so the US Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the select committee, said during the panel’s first hearing on Thursday to preview its coming work.

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“In the days before Jan. 6, President Trump told his top Justice Department officials: ‘Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.’”

Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department was reported just days after President Biden took office in a New York Times report detailing a remarkable meeting during which Trump said he would install a mid-level lawyer as his attorney general in order to forward an investigation into election fraud claims in Georgia and other states.

Donoghue told the committee he told Trump, “What you are proposing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election.”

The delay is the latest stumbling block for the committee, after Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, failed to appear at Monday’s hearing because his wife went into labor.

The committee pivoted to showing numerous recorded clips from his prior deposition with investigators, but it delayed the hearing’s start by 45 minutes and removed one of the star witnesses from the lineup.

Updated at 10:08 a.m.


thehill.com

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