1/6 panel hears of Trump's pressure on Justice Department

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump hounded the Justice Department to pursue his false election fraud claims, contacting the agency's leader “virtually every day” and striving in vain to enlist top law enforcement officials in a desperate bid to stay in power, according to testimony Thursday to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Three Trump-era Justice Department officials testified that Trump was fixated on voter fraud claims and insisted they pursue them despite being repeatedly told that none of the allegations had any merit.

“He had this arsenal of allegations,” said Richard Donoghue, one top Justice official. "I went through them piece by piece to say, no, they were not true.”

Another witness, Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general in the final days of the Trump administration, said he was called by Trump or met with him virtually every day from the time he ascended to the post in late December 2020. The common theme he said, was “dissatisfaction about what the Justice Department had done to investigate election fraud.”

The hearing brought attention to a memorably turbulent stretch at the department as Trump in his final days in office sought to bend to his will a law enforcement agency that has long cherished its independence from the White House. The testimony was aimed at showing that Trump not only relied on outside advisers to press his false claims of election fraud but also tried to leverage the powers of federal executive branch agencies.

The scheme by Trump was a “brazen attempt” to use the Justice Department for his own political gain, said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the Jan. 6 committee.

“Donald Trump didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate,” Thompson said. “He wanted the...