At 3 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021, Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division and an expert in environmental law, strode into the conference room of his boss, the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who had taken over weeks earlier from Mr. Barr.
Mr. Clark was there with some remarkable but by that point not entirely surprising news for Mr. Rosen: Mr. Trump had offered Mr. Clark the job of running the Justice Department, effective that day. Mr. Rosen, according to an account he gave the Senate Judiciary Committee, could stay on as the No. 2 if he wished. Mr. Rosen replied that he was not about to be fired by a subordinate and said he would take the matter directly to Mr. Trump.
The maneuvering for control of the Justice Department was a closely held secret at that point, but it underscored the lengths to which Mr. Trump was willing to go to forestall his defeat.
Over the span of several weeks, a battle raged among camps inside the administration and among allies of Mr. Trump over who would lead the Justice Department at a moment when it was under intense pressure from Mr. Trump to do more to investigate and validate his wide-ranging and unsupported claims that he had been robbed of re-election by fraud.
And over a few tense days, Mr. Trump brought to a head a plan that would have pushed aside Mr. Rosen, who had refused the president’s entreaties, in favor of Mr. Clark, a loyalist who was eagerly promoting steps including having the Justice Department send Georgia officials a letter stating that voter fraud allegations could invalidate the state’s Electoral College results — a message with no basis.
Mr. Barr had earlier dismissed allegations of widespread fraud, but Mr. Trump was not about to give up. He and his allies, including a band of Republican House members and several conservative lawyers, contacted Justice Department leaders nearly every day leading up to Jan. 6, sometimes multiple times a day, with demands for fraud investigations and other steps to overturn the election.
Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, for instance, worked with Mr. Clark to try to persuade Georgia officials to withdraw the state’s results. Others pushed the department to bring the fight to the Supreme Court.
The pressure campaign ramped up on Dec. 14, the day Mr. Trump announced that the department’s then-No. 2 official, Mr. Rosen, would replace Mr. Barr. An aide to Mr. Trump emailed Mr. Rosen talking points about voter fraud in Michigan and problems with Dominion Voting Systems machines, the first of many fraud conspiracy theories that Mr. Rosen and his team would examine and debunk.
The next day in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion’s voting machines and other issues. He wanted the department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn the election. Mr. Rosen rebuffed the requests, as he would for the next 19 days, reiterating Mr. Barr’s statement that there was no widespread fraud.
Mr. Trump said that the Justice Department was not fighting hard enough for him.
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June 09, 2022 at 04:00PM
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Jan. 6: The Story So Far - The New York Times
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