Steven Engel, a top Justice Department official who opposed President Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, is scheduled to testify before the House Committee on June 23 that the January 6 attack investigation.
Angel will personally testify before the panel along with Trump’s former acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and former acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue.
As Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Advice, Engel ran the office that provided legal advice to the president and executive branch agencies during the Trump administration.
Engel told Trump that he and other senior Justice Department officials would resign if he fired Rosen and nominated Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general, according to Rosen’s statement of Oct. 13, 2021, before the Jan. 6 House Committee. Clark devised a plan for the department to send letters to states that lost Trump, in which they instructed them to appoint an alternative list of voters who would vote for Trump. Clark outlined the plan to Trump, who threatened to replace Rosen with Clark unless Rosen signed his name to the letters and sent them, according to a Senate Judicial report.
Rosen reportedly refused to cooperate on the plan.
The exchange took place during a White House meeting on January 3, 2021. Trump finally decided not to fire Rosen and the letters were never sent.
According to Rosen, Engel told the president: “If you replace Jeff Rosen with Jeff Clark and send this letter [to Georgia], I would have no choice. I will have to resign. “
Clark – who at the time was in charge of the Department of Justice’s civil division – “repeatedly told the president that if he were put in the chair, he would do real investigations that, in his opinion, would uncover widespread fraud,” Clark said. Donoghue said in a statement to the committee on October 1.
Donoghue said Engel told the president that if all senior officials from the Department of Justice left, Clark would be left with a “cemetery” at the department.
For more information on the key players in the January 6 committee hearings, click here.
