Jan. 6 committee to present evidence that Trump tried to influence election

WASHINGTON - The House Jan. 6 committee will present evidence that former President Donald Trump tried to enlist the Justice Department in his failed bid to overturn the 2020 election, according to panel officials.

The president was trying to advance his own agenda in order to stay in power at the end of his term, a committee aide said. We will look at how that really is different from historical precedent and how the president was using the DOJ for his own personal means. Trump's interactions with Justice officials, including in the Oval Office, are an emerging historical record that committee members say shows he orchestrated an illegal multi-prong campaign to invalidate his defeat.

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the panel, is scheduled to lead the questioning of three witnesses Thursday: former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

The panel has already aired recorded testimony from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said he told Trump in December 2020 that the election was not stolen. On Thursday, lawmakers plan to ask former Justice officials about Trump's push to have the agency declare that the election was flawed and subsequent attempts to reverse Barr's findings. The committee aides said the panel will focus on a Jan. 3 Oval Office meeting at which Trump threatened to replace Rosen with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer and loyalist.

The aide said that Clark wanted to reverse the department's investigative conclusions about election fraud and send letters to state legislatures asking them to withdraw their certified electoral votes.

Federal agents visited Clark's home Wednesday, according to a U.S. attorney's office spokesman. Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official and Clark's employer at the Center for Renewing America, criticized the raid as political.

The three witnesses are expected to testify that they threatened to quit if Trump appointed him to the top Justice post.

In its four previous public hearings, the committee has presented evidence through documents and witness testimony about the physical attack on the Capitol, Trump's efforts to pressure President Mike Pence and state officials to stop Joe Biden from taking office, and his team's plan to replace official elections from seven states with slates of fake voters. There are a lot of people around the edge, particularly in the Republican Party and elsewhere, who didn't know the full story, Kinzinger told NBC News in an interview. Now when they see the complete story, they are really awestruck by it, and how close we got and how brazen this attempt was to change the election.