It’s very likely that sometime this week hearings will being in Congress on former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and one of the key witnesses who has agreed to testify is a man who was a deputy attorney general at the Justice Department as Trump began demanding that the DOJ help him steal a second term in office.
That potential “star witness,” according to Aaron Blake of The Washington Post, is Richard P. Donoghue, who was acting deputy attorney general when Trump told the DOJ to find potential voting irregularities he could use as the basis for his claims that Democrats had stolen the election from him:
“Donoghue’s name has surfaced in two separate instances in recent days.
“First, over the weekend, came notes he had written during a December meeting with Trump in which, according to Donoghue’s notes, Trump urged the Justice Department to ‘just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen.’
“Trump at one point appeared to suggest an overhaul of Justice Department leadership if they didn’t comply, saying, according to Donoghue’s notes, ‘People tell me Jeff Clarke [sic] is great, I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership.'”
Donoghue’s name also came to the forefront on another occasion, this time involving the state of Georgia:
2″The other big revelation this week involves a highly unorthodox draft letter from Clark. In it, Clark sought to urge the Georgia state legislature to call a special session to look at potentially overturning the election results in their state. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, the proposed letter appears to be the latest in a series of thinly veiled attempts among Trump allies to lay a predicate for getting Congress not to accept the election results Jan. 6.”
Donoghue made it clear he wasn’t about to go along with such a plan:
“But Donoghue again flatly objected. He wrote in response that the alleged ‘irregularities’ Clark based his draft letter upon ‘are of such a small scale that they simply would not impact the outcome of the Presidential Election.’ He also said, even setting that aside, that it was hardly the Justice Department’s business to urge a state legislature to take such actions based upon investigations the department generally would never comment upon.”
Donoghue, it should be noted, has agreed to testify willingly to Congress, as if he wants it on the record exactly how Trump tried to bend the Justice Department to his will for the purpose of committing a criminal act: Election fraud.
Once Congress has all of the evidence in hand, they can then refer the matter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will be hard-pressed to let the matter pass without filing charges against Trump and his accomplices. And that alone suggests even more sleepless nights for the former president and members of his inner circle who were eager to assist him in subverting the will of the American people.
