# Transcribed Interview of Richard Peter Donoghue, (Oct. 1, 2021)/11:00am

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    BY :
Q I see. Okay. Anything else about that meeting that you recall?
A Again, it's difficult. There were a number of meetings, so I don't want to mix them in my mind. But the core of that meeting, that discussion, was certainly Antrim County. And we were able to say to the President, we should know in a few days. And that satisfied him, and we left.
Q All right. I see.
All right. I just have a couple more questions about Mr. Barr before he resigned. How did you hear about Attorney General Barr's decision to resign? Did you hear about it from him or from some other source?
A The actual decision to resign that day I heard about from another source. I wasn't surprised, obviously. There was clearly tension between the Attorney General and the President. You know, it had become sort of a running issue and a running joke in some ways. Every time he returned from the White House, I asked him if he was still the Attorney General. So—
Q Tell me more about that tension. What was the heart of it? Was is it election-related?
A I didn't ask the Attorney General. Again, most of this was publicly reported, and so, you know, we see the papers like everyone else. He was clearly frustrated. And it wasn't for me to pry into what was discussed or how it was discussed or anything like that, but there was clearly tension.
And so, when he went over there on the 14th, we had our regular 9:00 a.m. meeting with him that morning. He did say something about, you know, well, maybe by ​the end of the day I won't be the Attorney General anymore. But, again, that was sort of a common comment around this time period.
And he left sometime I think in the early afternoon, maybe around lunch or something like that. After he left, I was in DAG Rosen's office, and one of his staff members brought down his resignation letter. And she handed copies to me and DAG Rosen and said, you know, you two should know what's going on, he's going over to resign, he's had it, and you need to know what's going on because we don't know, you know, what's going to come out of this meeting.
Again, had the President fired Attorney General Barr at that meeting, then, by function of law, DAG Rosen would become the Acting Attorney General. So, as far as we knew, he could become the Acting Attorney General at any moment, and it was important that he know what the situation was.
So we sat in his office; we read the letter. It didn't surprise us. And then we sort of went back to work over the next few hours to wait to see what happened at the meeting.
Q And then did you get a summary of what happened at the meeting from AG Barr or anyone else about the conversation he had with the President in which he tendered his resignation?
A Yes. Late that afternoon, he returned. I saw his detail in the courtyard. You can look down to the courtyard, and I knew his security detail, obviously.
I think I got a call from and she said, he wants you to come up. So I went up to the fifth floor, and I went into his office. I asked him if he was still the Attorney General, he said yes, and then he gave me a brief explanation of the meeting with the President.
Q Tell us what he said.
​A He said that the meeting had gone as well as it could, that he had given his resignation letter to the President, the President appreciated the letter. It was sort of an amicable parting.
And then he said something to the effect of, now he's got to figure out who is going to be the Attorney General. That comment surprised me a little bit, because I assumed, and I think everyone else assumed, that Deputy Attorney General Rosen would be the Acting Attorney General upon AG Barr's departure.
And so I said, well, that will be the DAG. And he responded something to the effect of, "Maybe, maybe not. Your name came up. You should be prepared to get called over to the White House, I would think tomorrow morning. You should take tonight and think about what you want to do if he offers you the job."
All of this surprised me. I just kind of took it in. I said, okay. And then I went back to my office on the fourth floor.
Q Let me stop you there for a minute. Did he say anything more about discussion he had—he, Attorney General Barr—more discussion that he had with the President about allegations of election fraud or the Department's endeavors to investigate these allegations?
A Not really. But if you look at the opening lines of his letter, it says something to the effect of, "I appreciate the opportunity to brief you today on how these investigations have gone and how they will go in the future," which I thought was a very intentional piece of wording on his part, saying that, look, this is what we going to do, this is what we are going to continue to do.
But he didn't give me the details of the discussion beyond just generally characterizing that it went as well as it could.
Q Yeah.
​We had talked before, Mr. Donoghue, about the December 1st public reporting of his statement, no evidence of systemic fraud. Did he ever tell you that he had provided that kind of information directly to the President in face-to-face meetings—he, again, Attorney General Barr?
A I don't remember specifically hearing that from him, but it was my impression that he was relaying that to the President.
Q That he was relaying, "Hey, there's no evidence of fraud; we're looking at it, and we're not finding anything," was it your impression that he was conveying that generally to the President over the course of the time between the election and his resignation?
Q Yes, it was.
Q Okay.
So, after you had this conversation with Attorney General Barr about "think about whether you want to be Attorney General," did you hear from the President directly?
A I did. I went back to my office immediately after that. I called my wife. I told her what was going on. And, you know, she said, well, what are you going to do? And I said, I can't even think about it right now, there's too much going on, and I'll think about it tonight, we'll talk tonight. And I hung up.
A few minutes later, the phone rang, my—I believe it was my government cell phone rang. I answered it. It said, "This is the White House operator. Please hold for the President." And then the President came on the line and we had a brief discussion.
Q Tell us about the discussion.
A As I recollect, the President said, "Have you heard that Bill is leaving?"
I said, "Yes, sir. I saw him when he returned to the building. I heard that you had a good meeting."
​He said, "Yes, yes, it was a very good meeting. It was fine. He gave me a letter, a beautiful letter. It talks about some of the things we've been able to do together, so I really appreciate that. But he's leaving, and now I have to figure out who should be the Attorney General. I think you'd do a great job in that position. Is that something you'd want to do? Do you want to serve as the Attorney General?"
And I just responded, "Mr. President, I appreciate the consideration, but I really think it's in the best interest of the country, the Department, and you to follow the regular procedures. We have procedures for this situation, and I think those should be followed."
And he said, "That means Jeff Rosen would serve as the Acting Attorney General."
I said, "That's right. He's a great lawyer. He'd do a great job."
And he said, "You would serve as his deputy?" as a question. And I said that he and I had discussed that, if AG Barr left, that I would function in the Deputy Attorney General's role.
He asked if I was going to leave before the end of the administration. I said I was not, I was going to stay until the end. And he said, "Okay. That's fine. I'll call Jeff in a little while."
I hung up the phone. I went immediately back up to the fifth floor so that AG Barr was aware of what had just happened. I explained it to him very briefly, and he said, "Okay."
I went back downstairs. At that point, our weekly Monday staff meeting was already underway. We had a weekly 4:30 staff meeting with the DAG, myself, the chief of staff, and the various associate deputy attorneys general. I I went into the staff meeting, which was in the DAG's conference room. There were about 8 or 10 people in the conference room, a number more on the telephone.
​And as I walked in, DAG Rosen's phone, cell phone, started ringing. He took it out, he looked at it. He looked a little perplexed, like he was deciding whether to answer it. And I said, "Sir, I think that's the White House. You should answer it."
He answered it, and I heard him say, "Yes, I can hold." And he began walking back toward his office. I followed him into his office. I took a Post-it note, I wrote "POTUS will ask you to be Acting AG upon Barr's departure," and I handed it to him. He nodded. I walked out of the room, closed the door, and I told the people assembled that the meeting was over.
Q I see.
A They all left. And, after a few minutes, he came to my office and told me about his conversation with the President.
Q And he was thereafter named to be Acting Attorney General upon AG Barr's departure—he, Rosen?
A Right. There was a tweet, or several tweets, that went out shortly after that from the President's account that said AG Barr has submitted his resignation, he'll be gone by Christmas, and that DAG Rosen will be the Acting Attorney General and that I would be in the position of the Deputy Attorney General.
Q Do you have any idea, Mr. Donoghue, why the President contemplated—or, actually, offered you, leaping over Rosen, the position of Acting Attorney General?
A No. I'd had very limited contact with the President. From, I think, January of 2019 until December of 2020, I'd had no contact with him. I hadn't seen him, hadn't spoken to him for an extended period of time.
I had interacted with the President as the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York. It's his home district. He's very interested in what goes on there. He was very interested in our MS-13 prosecution program. He and I had discussed that way ​back when, in 2017 and 2018.
But there was a long period of time when I had no contact with the President. So the notion that he was considering me for that surprised me.
Q So he was familiar with your work in the Eastern District of New York and you'd had some conversations with him about that in the past?
A Yes. I'd had conversations with him relating to the MS-13 work. I'd had conversations with him during a bill signing in the Oval Office about some of our human trafficking work. And he also called to congratulate the trial team when El Chapo was convicted and when El Chapo was sentenced, so I had two phone calls from him on that case. So he was aware of the case.
Q I see.
During the conversation with you that night that you just described, did he say anything disparaging about Jeff Rosen or express any concern about Rosen's fitness to serve as Acting Attorney General?
A No, not at all.
Q Okay.
# # # # # # # aaaaaaa— — — All right. I am going to pause here and see if any of the members of the select committee have any questions.
Ms. Cheney, we're going to start with you. Do you have anything?
Ms. Cheney. Thanks, I did have a question, a couple questions.
One is: Mr. Donoghue, we talked at some length about whether or not the White House or the President was informed about the Antrim report. On the result of the investigations, the interviews that had gone on on Fulton County, how would those results have been communicated to the White House, to the President?
Mr. Donoghue. I don't know how they were initially communicated. I do know ​that they came up in subsequent conversations with the President. And DAG Rosen and I essentially told him, "We looked into that, and it's just not true."
Ms. Cheney. Okay. So he was informed?
Mr. Donoghue. I told the President myself that several times, in several conversations, that these allegations about ballots being smuggled in in a suitcase and run through the machines several times, it was not true, that we had looked at it, we looked at the video, we interviewed the witnesses, and it was not true.
Ms. Cheney. And that timeframe of those—when you informed the President, do you have a sense of the dates when that would've occurred?
Mr. Donoghue. I believe it was in the phone call on December 27th. It was also in a meeting in the Oval Office on December 31st. I believe I mentioned that specifically both times.
Ms. Cheney. Okay.
Okay. And then do we have a date for the briefing that you mentioned with AG Barr, Rosen, Wray? I think this would've been the briefing with CISA about the Antrim County.
Mr. Donoghue. I don't remember specifically. It may be on a calendar someplace. But we did that somewhere between December 14th and December 18th. Because—
Ms. Cheney. Okay.
Mr. Donoghue. —the email from Ken Cuccinelli on December 18th was pursuant to that briefing and the discussion we had at the briefing.
Ms. Cheney. Okay.
And then, just to note for the record—and, , you might have done this, but—the exhibit 3, that email that we received, the subject line here is "From POTUS." I ​think that's—it came from the President's secretary, and it seems to indicate that he asked that it be sent. That's the Antrim County report that was later found to be false. And that's all I've got. Thank you.
    BY
Q All right, Mr. Donoghue. Just a couple more things before we move on to something new.
You mentioned earlier that there was tension between Attorney General Barr and the President. Did that go back prior to the December 1st public statement about election fraud? In other words, was the tension something that stemmed from that statement or predated the statement, to the extent you know, that you observed?
I'm sorry, I'm not—for whatever reason, you're muted again.
A Okay. Can you hear me now?
Q Yes. Thank you.
A I would say it predated that statement. The Attorney General was clearly frustrated in November.
Q Uh-huh. And any idea from him or other sources as to why he was frustrated? What was the impetus of that frustration?
A I really think he'd have to answer that. I mean, I can just give you my impression from working with him every day. And it seemed—
Q Yeah. I'm interested in your impression from working with him every day.
A He was clearly frustrated. Every time he came back from the White House, he was irritated. He just was not happy with the way things were going.
And I think that was understandable. I think he was in a very difficult position; the Department was in a very difficult position. The President seemed to clearly believe that there was widespread fraud and that the election had been stolen, and he wanted ​the Department to do something about it.
And, to some extent, we were, but, at the same time, we have a very limited role in all this. The President didn't seem to understand that we, the Department, have a very limited role. And we had to explain that to the President repeatedly after AG Barr left. I would imagine that he was having similar conversations with the President prior to his departure, but he wasn't giving me the details of those conversations.
Q I see. So the tension surrounded the Department's limited role in elections? Or is it your view that it was broader than that, that it extended to other issues on which they had interaction?
A I don't think it was limited to the election.
Q What—again, your impressions? I understand that this is just based on your conversations with him or others. What other sources of tension were there?
A You know, again, I wouldn't want to speculate. And I say that only because, you know, it appeared to me that there was frustration even before the election and certainly before December 1st. Attorney General Barr and the President are very different personalities, and they have very different approaches to things. And so I would imagine it was a difficult time for the Attorney General.
Q Yeah. I understand.
All right. One last question. Did Mr. Rosen tell you anything about his conversation with the President when he was offered the AG job? Did he provide any quotes or comments or color to that conversation?
A He did. It was very short, the phone conversation was very short, because he came into my office within a few minutes of him getting the phone call in the conference room.
And he said, "Spoke to the President. He did ask me to serve as the Acting ​Attorney General. I told him I'd be happy to do that. He wanted to make sure that you," meaning me, "stayed on as the Deputy," and I told him that would happen. "And he wished us well, and he thanked us for sticking around until the end."
Q Yeah.
Do you know whether or not, Mr. Donoghue, the President had had as much interaction with Mr. Rosen at that point as he had had with you? I mean, you mentioned the bill signings and the personal calls about El Chapo. Do you know whether he'd had similar interaction with Mr. Rosen, or was he less familiar with Mr. Rosen at that point?
A I knew that he'd had some. DAG Rosen was at Transportation before coming over to the Department. I can't really tell you what the level of interaction was, but I knew that he had some. He'd have to explain that to you.
Q I see.
Okay. I am going to move into, now, the time after Attorney General Barr leaves. Are you okay to keep going, or do you need a break? I mean, this is a new—
A I'm fine.
Q It's a convenient place to stop, unless you want to keep going.
Mr. Andres. Maybe we should take 5 minutes, .
. Yeah. Let's take 5, Greg. That's no problem. Thank you.
Mr. Donoghue. Okay. Thanks.
[Recess.]
# # # # # # # aaaaaaa— — — All right, Mr. Donoghue, we're back on the record. Thank you.
    BY :
Q I want to move, now, to the time in which you were essentially serving as the Acting Deputy Attorney General, albeit without that title, and call your attention to some ​contacts that you had in that role with the former President and others in the White House.
And I want to start with the call on December the 27th and call your attention to exhibit 6, which I understand is—
A Yes, I have it.
Q Now, is exhibit 6, Mr. Donoghue, contemporaneous notes that you actually took as this telephone call was going on?
A Yes.
Q All right. Tell us, first of all, the circumstances of how it is that you ended up on the phone on December 27th with the President and others. How did you get involved in that conversation?
A I traveled back to New York on December 24th for Christmas. I was up there for a couple of days. I think the 27th is a Sunday. I was preparing to go back to Washington that evening.
I was at home on Long Island, and my government cell phone rang. It was Acting Attorney General Rosen. I answered it. And he said, essentially, "Hey, I'm on the phone with the President. We've been on for about 30 minutes. He's talking about some of this election stuff. You know it better than I do. Do you mind if I conference you in?" And I said, "Sure. Of course. That's fine." And he conferenced me in to the call with the President.
Q Okay. And were you—again, your understanding, Mr. Donoghue, that you were conferenced in because there was going to be discussion of the stuff with which you'd been personally involved, the election-related matters in the U.S. attorneys' offices?
ARight. Throughout this time, I had a better handle on what the Department ​was aware of and what we had done than the Acting Attorney General did. So he often relied on me to provide that information to him at least, if not the President.
And, again, just to remind you, our general approach with regard to these things was to say, you know, "Yes, sir, we're aware of that. Thank you." If there was an instance, as there was here, where he, the President, raised something we were not aware of, we would say, "Okay. We're not aware of that, but thank you," and do whatever we deemed appropriate with it.
Q Yeah.
What I'd like you to do—I appreciate that, Mr. Donoghue. I'd like you to just sort of walk us through your notes, using them—sort of read them to us and tell us, if you can, more about the discussion that's reflected in those notes.
A Okay.
So it's 12/27/20. It says, "DAG call." I refer to Jeff Rosen as the "DAG" through most of my notes and emails even while he was the Acting Attorney General.
It says, "DAG call—on with POTUS and wants to conference me in."
"P"—which means "President"—"Country is up in arms over the corruption."
"Scott Perry"—I have a parenthetical that says "PA," Pennsylvania—"and Senator from Pennsylvania, Greg Mastriano—some of the"—I'm sorry, I can't make out that word—something "calling."
Q Uh-huh.
A "205,000 votes—more than they have voters in Pennsylvania."
"Flooded the market with ballots."
"600,000 votes added—570,000 votes for Biden, few for me, and lots of blanks."
"0332"—hours in the morning—"flooded the market, multiple States, all at once."
​"Jim Jordan"—
Q All right, let me stop you there. I want you to just tell us what you remember about this allegation about Pennsylvania in terms of the "more than they have voters," what that involved and what you at the Department were familiar with and did about that allegation.
A So, again, I tried to keep on top of the allegations as they were surfacing and just make sure that the U.S. attorneys were aware of them. Or, in many instances, the U.S. attorneys were already aware, and they made me aware of them.
The reason I took notes in this meeting is because it started with this allegation that I'd never heard of. And so the President was saying, essentially, the Pennsylvania secretary of State certified 205,000 more votes than were actually cast in Pennsylvania. Sometimes he would say 205; sometimes he would say 250. So you see it changes a little bit in the notes. But, essentially, the allegation was that the secretary of State had certified more votes than were actually cast in the State of Pennsylvania.
And, from what I recall, the President was saying, "This is clear fraud. It's right there out in the open. You don't even have to investigate; you can just look on the internet and see her certification and see the official count and see the difference of several hundred thousand votes. It's clear that this is fraud." That's essentially what he was saying about Pennsylvania.
And since I had not heard that particular allegation before, I began taking notes, because I thought, well, we better understand what he's saying here so that we can decide what, if anything, we should do about it.
Q Yeah.
And then you have a followup—
A He mixes this—
​Q —call with Congressman—
A I'm sorry. He mixes this with some other allegations, which obviously relate to other States, where he's talking about what he was calling, you know, a dump of ballots in the middle of the night, things like that.
Q Yeah.
And you have a subsequent call with Congressman Perry about that, is that right, after this is over with?
AIt was later that night, because I was in the vehicle going back to Washington. And you'll see, I think, at the end of these notes from the 27th, the President asked for my cell number, which he already had anyway, but—and he said, you know, I might have people call you with evidence. Okay, fine.
Q Got it. All right. We'll get to that.
A And so the Congressman—
Q Yeah, we'll get to that. Let's just keep going through the notes. I wanted to make sure I was clear that that was all about Pennsylvania.
So I think you left off with Jim Jordan.
A Right. So he made a passing reference to Jim Jordan. He said, "That guy's a fighter."
He was saying how several people out there, Jim Jordan and others, were trying to find out what happened with regard to these various fraud allegations and that they were doing what they could but that their authority was limited, and so, you know, this is something the Department should be aware of, these are things the Department should be looking at.
So it says, "We're like a Third World country." He was essentially saying, you know, if our elections are not trustworthy, we will be relegated to Third World country ​status.
He mentioned Detroit. He said, "Look at the districts in Michigan. Won nearly all but not Wayne County." And I put in parentheses "Detroit."
The call dropped at that point, and there was a break of a few minutes. And I think I called DAG Rosen back, and that immediately put me back into the conference conversation. The President was still talking.
He said, "We have thousands of people who went in to vote and were told you already voted by absentee ballot."
"People are angry. They're blaming DOJ and others for inaction."
We talked about the statistics. He said, if you look at this statistically, "election night, it was a done deal. Somehow, overnight, the outcome changed because all these ballots showed up" in the middle of the night in States like "Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania."
He said, this is a huge problem, and it's not just this election. "People won't have confidence in the Georgia senate races" that are coming up.
He said, "Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan" all had "corrupted elections."
"People are complaining to him constantly" about the fraud and why nothing's being done about it.
He said, "Thousands of people had called their U.S. attorney's offices and the FBI" around the country.
He complained that "DOJ is failing to respond to legitimate complaints and reports of crimes."
He then got back to Pennsylvania, and he said there were "5 million votes in the State"—
Q Let me stop you for a minute before you get back to Pennsylvania. So this ​is a phone call with you and Mr. Rosen. It's just the three of you—you and the President and Mr. Rosen?
A As far as I know. I don't know of anyone else being on that call.
Q And he is frustrated with you. Like, the theme here is that you all, meaning the Department of Justice—
A That's correct.
A —are not doing anything, are not doing enough to investigate these very serious allegations of fraud.
"DOJ failing to respond to legitimate complaints/reports of crimes." seems to, sort of, summarily describe his general view about the Department's inaction during this period of time. Is that right?
A Yes, that's right.
Q Okay. And is he encouraging you to do something? Is the purpose of the call, in your view, hey, you've got to look at this, you know, do more along these lines?
A I will say, throughout this call and really throughout all the conversations at this point, there was no point at which the President directed us to do something specific. He didn't say, I want you to open a file, I want you to interview this witness, or whatever it is. But it was very clear that he thought we should be doing more than he believed we were doing.
Q Yeah.
A Now, that might have been due in some part to the fact that we didn't tell him everything we were doing. DAG Rosen and I had had several discussions about what our general approach would be with the President. And, as a general matter, we said we were going to hear him out, and to the extent he raised things that we were aware of, we would simply respond, "Yes, sir, we're aware of that." If we had done ​enough investigation to dispel it, we would simply report, "We looked at that, and that's not true," or, "We looked at that, and there's no evidence to support that."
Q What—
A So he would know—
Q I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
A So that he would know that, in fact, we were doing our job and what our conclusion was. But we were not telling him specifics about individual investigations or anything like that.
Q Tell me more about that last statement, Mr. Donoghue. Why did you and Mr. Rosen have concern about providing him with more specific information about the Department's efforts? What was the, sort of, negative outcome that could ensue from providing him with that level of detail?
A We just didn't think it was necessary, frankly. And he wasn't asking for it. He wasn't asking about how many witnesses did you interview, and what did you do, and things like that.
The problem, or part of the problem, was there were so many of these allegations that, when you addressed one, you said, "Mr. President, thanks, we looked at that, but there's nothing further to be done there," he would just roll on to another one. And so he had this stream of allegations, which were clearly being fed to him by a number of people, that he would keep referring our way.
And, again, if we didn't know about it, like this Pennsylvania one that he raised here, we would say, "Okay, I hadn't heard of that, thank you." But, for the most part, we would say, "Yes, we're aware of that."
So he was frustrated, and his frustration obviously increased over time.
Q Okay.
​If you can go back to your notes, I think you can go back to "Pennsylvania" here at the top of page 3.
A So then he goes back to Pennsylvania. He says, "5 million voters in the State, but they certified 5.25 million votes. That's clear fraud."
I have a parenthetical to the left there that says, "Possibly true?" Again, if there's 250,000 more votes certified, there's a problem. But, on its face, that didn't sound like something that was likely.
Then he went to Georgia. He's talking about the tape. This is the video of the interior of the State Farm Arena. "The tape there shows fraud."
Underneath that, it says, "Ruby Freeman," who was one of the individuals on the tape. Next to that, it says, "Huckster." Then it says, "Closed the facility and then came back with hidden ballots under the table."
Also, to the top right there off of "Huckster," I wrote, "Election scammer." That's just how the President referenced her.
Underneath, it says, "Networks," meaning the television networks, "magnified the tape and saw them running them," the ballots, "through repeatedly."
So that's what he was relaying with regard to the video at the State Farm Arena.
Q And that is one, at that point, Mr. Donoghue, that were familiar with and you had already—there had already been some investigation done, as evidenced by that email exchange with Michael Bowdich before.
A Yes. Yeah. I don't remember if that review, investigation, was completed at that point or not. I think it was. But, yes, I was aware of that.
Q Okay.
All right. Keep going.
A Then the President said, "You guys may not be following the internet the ​way I do." I wrote that down in quotes. That's an exact quote from the President.
Q When you do write in your notes something in quotes does that reflect a verbatim quote from the President?
A Yes.
Q Okay. So he said, "You guys may not be following the internet the way I do," and you wrote it down as he said it.
A Yes.
Q Okay. Great.
Keep going.
A Then he went back to Detroit. He said in Detroit they "threw the poll watchers out." He was complaining, saying they're not allowed to do that, it's a violation of the law, they had violated the law all over the country.
He said, you "don't even need to look at the illegal aliens voting—don't need to. It's so obvious."
Then he was talking about the FBI. He said, the "FBI will always say there's nothing there. The leaders there oppose me; SAs," which means special agents, "support me." He didn't use the term "special agents," but he said, "the agents" or "the line guys," something like that, "support me." I just wrote that down as "SAs."
Q Yeah. He's claiming that the FBI leadership somehow is against him or isn't taking these claims seriously because they dislike him or they oppose him?
A Correct.
Q Was that consistent with your impression of Director Wray and the FBI leadership?
A No.
Q Okay.
​A Then the next page, this is him continuing about the FBI. He says, "I made some bad decisions on leadership there, but I was laboring under an illegal investigation. The special prosecutor should never have been commenced."
Then he says—he was complaining about the appointment of the special prosecutor, and he says, "You," meaning DAG Rosen and I, "figure out what to do with Hunter Biden." That's up to you guys. But "people will criticize the DOJ if Hunter's not investigated for real."
That was sort of an aside. That's all he said about it. It was a very brief comment. But it was off-topic, and I wrote it down.
Q All right.
All the way at the top there—
A Also—
Q —you have in parentheses "TN"—"that whole thing, angry." Tell me what that is about.
A Right. So "TN" is Tennessee. Again, this was another aside. The President has a very unusual way of speaking. He's got a lot of tangents that go into his train of thought.
And so he mentioned Tennessee. He said, "That whole thing, crazy. Talked to the Governor there." He's or she is "also upset."
That was a reference to an explosion that took place on Christmas morning in Nashville, where an individual had packed his mobile home with explosives and detonated it early that morning. And so that was in the news. And the U.S. attorney was deeply involved, and we were dealing with that throughout Christmas. So the President just made reference to that.
Q Okay. So, in the middle of this call where he's ranting about election ​issues, he mentions the special counsel, he mentions the explosion in Tennessee, he mentions FBI—allegations that the FBI doesn't like him, and he mentions Hunter Biden. All of that—
A Yes.
Q —just are part of the tangents that you referenced in terms of his manner of speaking?
A Correct.
Q And any response by you or Mr. Rosen to any of those specific—
A So, throughout this—the President, obviously, does the great majority of the talking. But, throughout this, both DAG Rosen and I are just trying to respond very specifically to what he's saying and saying things like, "Okay, that's fine, sir." This thing about Pennsylvania having more votes than ballots actually cast, "We can look at that, we'll figure that out."
You know, as far as some of this other stuff, we were saying, "We're aware of it. We've looked at it. We've got it," or, "There's nothing there." I can't remember if we were at the point—I think we were at the point in Georgia to be able to say that we had looked at that and did not believe that to be the case.
Q Yeah. That's the next section of your notes, where you say "Georgia legislature"—or he talks about the Georgia legislature. Can you pick up from there?
A Right. So it says, "Georgia legislature is on our side. They want to bring a case, but the Governor won't let them," meaning they want to file some sort of civil case. The Governor won't let them.
He then goes back to the statistics. He says, "Statistically impossible for me to lose. Bookies had me at 100 percent on election night. It dropped to 32 percent in 4 or 5 hours. That's never happened before."
​So now this is an example of DAG Rosen responding. And he said essentially, "We'll look at whether we have more ballots in Pennsylvania than registered voters. Should be able to check that out quickly. But understand that the DOJ can't and won't snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election. It doesn't work that way."
Q So DAG Rosen directly says, "We cannot snap our fingers and change the outcome of the election. It doesn't work that way." Clear pushback to the President looking for some sort of Department of Justice finger snap to delay the results of the election.
A Yes, that's what he said. And he was, to some extent, pushing back and—
Q Yeah.
A —trying to make the President understand the Department's role.
Q Yeah. So what does the President say in response to that pushback from Mr. Rosen?
A He says, "I don't expect you to do that. Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen."
Q Tell me more about that. What you did you interpret that to mean?
A So I put it in quotes. It is an exact quote from the President.
I took that to mean that he and his campaign, I suppose, were going to be pursuing a political effort on the Hill to challenge electoral college votes.
And we knew that was the case already. There was already public reporting on this. So I think the President and some of his supporters were talking about challenging electoral college votes when they made it to the Senate.
And so that didn't surprise me, that he had this avenue that he intended to pursue with what he called the "Republican Congressmen." So—
Q And the Department's role in that, Mr. Donoghue, is to say the election was ​corrupt, that he's asking, essentially, not for you to resolve all of these specific allegations, but just say that the election was corrupt, leave the rest to this political strategy?
A Right. So the Department had zero involvement in anyone's political strategy. I think he understood that, right?
Q Uh-huh.
A So he wanted us to say it was corrupt, you know, for whatever reason. I'll leave that to him or others to explain or determine. But he wanted us to say that it was corrupt.
And this was consistent with some things he said at other points about, the Department should publicly say that the election is corrupt or suspect or not reliable. At one point, he mentioned the possibility of having a press conference. We told him we were not going to do that.
Q Yeah.
A So this was something that was brought up more than once.
Q Yeah. So, again, there was a focus on public statements that something was corrupt, as opposed to trying specifically to get to the bottom of the individual allegations.
A Right.
Q All right. You at this point start talking. Is that right? You directly—"RPD" I assume, Mr. Donoghue, refers to statements that you now made on the call.
A Yes. So I tried to, again, put this in perspective and to try to put it in very clear terms to the President. And I said something to the effect of, "Sir, we've done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not ​supported by the evidence developed."
We've looked in "Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada."
"We are doing our job. Much of the info you're getting is false." And then I went into, "For instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about 68 percent error rate—reality is, it was only 0.0063 percent error rate, less than 1 in 15,000."
So the President accepted that. He said, "Okay, fine. But what about the others?"
And, again, this gets back to the point that there were so many of these allegations that, when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn't fight us on it, but he would move to another allegation. So then I talked a little bit about the Pennsylvania truck driver. This is another
allegation that had come up. And this claim was by a truck driver who believed, perhaps honestly, that he had transported an entire tractor-trailer truck full of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. And this was, again, out there in the public and discussed.
And I essentially said, look, we looked at that allegation, we looked "at both ends," both the people who load the truck and the people who unload the truck, and that that allegation was not supported by the evidence.
Again, he said, "Okay." And then he said, "Note, I didn't mention that one. What about the others?"
And I said, okay, well, with regard to Georgia, we "looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses. There is no suitcase." The President kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, no, sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over; there is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that's just how they move ballots around that facility. There's nothing suspicious about ​that at all.
I told him that there was "no multiple scanning of the ballots." One part of that allegation was that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four or five times to rack up votes presumably for Vice President Biden. I told him that the video did not support that.
Then he went off on "double voting," at the top of the next page. He said "dead people" are voting, "Indians are getting paid" to vote. He meant people on Native American reservations. He said, there's "lots of fraud" going on here.
Then he said, in Arizona, "I only lost by 9,000 votes. There's clearly more fraud than that" just in Arizona alone.
Then he got into these civil cases that were being brought around the country, and he says—and I think this was in response to DAG Rosen saying, look, the Department has nothing to do with many of these allegations. To the extent you want to challenge the way that the election was conducted in various States—we understood that there were complaints about the rules being changed by certain State officials after the fact and that it was not done pursuant to State legislatures' power.
DAG Rosen tried to say, we, the Department, have nothing to do with that. You're free to bring lawsuits. Your campaign can bring lawsuits. That can be litigated before judges. But we, the Department, don't do that. We do, essentially, criminal investigations and civil-rights matters.
And so the President's response was, well, the "judges keep saying, where's the DOJ? Why is the DOJ not filing these cases?" And we both responded, "we," the Department, "are not in a position based on the evidence. We can only act on the actual evidence developed."
My next note says, "Told him flat out that much of the information he's getting is ​false and/or just not supported by the evidence. We look at the allegations but they don't pan out."
The President was getting very frustrated. He said, "This is electioneering fraud."
And then, again, I have a quote from him: "We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election."
Then he said, "People tell me Jeff Clark is great" and that "I should put him in. People want me to replace DOJ leadership."
At which point I responded, sir, that's fine, you should have the leadership you want, but understand, changing the leadership in the Department won't change anything. The—
Q All right. Let me stop you there.
A —Department operates—
Q Let me stop you there, Mr. Donoghue. Just two things.
So, going back to, "We have an obligation to tell people that this was an illegal, corrupt election," is it fair to say that what he was asking you to do, primarily, was tell people, in some form, a press conference or otherwise, that there was corruption so that some other political strategy could unfold? Was it your impression that the precise ask from the President was more about a public statement than actually the day-to-day investigative work?
A I think he probably cared about both of them, but—I don't want to speculate about what was in his mind, but this is what he said. And I think what you take away from that, logically, is that he wanted the Department to say something publicly.
Q Right. So there's pressure on you and Mr. Rosen, to which you push back, to say something publicly, to say something publicly without basis, that there is an illegal, ​corrupt election, when your investigation suggested just the opposite.
A And I should say too that, in responding to some of these criticisms or observations, you know, DAG Rosen and I did sometimes make the point that, look, elections—or, any investigation takes time, and you can't just do this overnight, and so on and so forth. So this idea of, "Well, you ought to make a public statement in the meantime" made more sense in the context of the conversation than the notes might at first reflect.
Q I see. Okay.
And then when he mentions Jeff Clark, had Mr. Clark's name come up with him or with others with respect to allegations of election fraud, or is this the first time that you hear his name associated with this topic?
A This was the very first time I heard Jeff Clark mentioned in connection with election matters.
Q All right. What was Mr. Clark's job at the Department at this time, on December 27th, when you're on the phone with the President?
A He was the Acting Attorney General in charge of the Environmental and Natural Resources Division. That was his Senate-confirmed position. But, when the Acting Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division left a couple of months before, he was moved over to be the Acting Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division, and his deputy was running the Environmental Division.
So he was in an acting position over the Civil Division, which has very little responsibility with regard to election matters. So it was odd that he was being mentioned in connection with election matters.
Q All right. So you hadn't had any personal conversation with Mr. Clark or even heard about him being involved in any of the election-related matters with which ​you were familiar up to that point?
A That's right. I had no reason to think he had any involvement in any election matters.
Q And his substantive responsibility as head of the Civil Division would not put him in a position to be involved in any of those investigations. Is that right?
A Correct.
Q Okay.
All right. Keep going, then, in terms of what the President said.
A So, again, I tried to be very direct with the President at this point. I said, sir, you should have whatever leadership you want in the Department, but understand, changing leadership is not going to change the outcome. The Department acts on facts and evidence. And the facts are what they are, the evidence is what it is, and it's not going to change.
At that point, the President said, "You, Rich, should go to Fulton County and do a signature verification, and you'll see how illegal it is. You'll find tens of thousands" of illegal ballots. I didn't respond to that.
The President then continued, there are "more votes than voters." Somehow Wisconsin came up. I guess he cited Wisconsin and some claim that there were more votes than registered voters in Wisconsin. But I was aware of that allegation, and I said, you know, that was just a matter of them "comparing the 2020 votes cast to 2016 registration numbers." That is "not a valid complaint." The voter rolls grow cycle after cycle, and that's just normal population growth.
And the President said, "Nobody trusts the FBI." That's also a quote. He said, we need other people to look at this, to work on this.
And then he went back to Fulton County and said, "I'd like to request" that you go ​to Fulton County and check the signatures.
Q All right. Is this different—is this—you had said before that he was just talking about what people are saying. Is this now—and your quotes suggests this is what the President said, "I'd like to request"—him actually making a specific direction or request that the Department take some action?
A Yes, it's a specific ask. He asked that I go to Fulton County, Georgia, to participate in some sort of signature verification process.
I wrote it down in quotes. I thought it was interesting that he phrased it that way. It was, to some extent, an example of him recognizing that he can make requests, but he was not directing specific actions.
Q I see. Okay. So you interpreted that as a request, not a direction.
A Yeah, it was. And I didn't go to Fulton County. So I took it as a request, and I treated it as such. And there was no reason for me to go to Fulton County, so I didn't go.
Q Okay.
A And the DAG responded to that. He said something to the effect of, "We will take that into account," meaning, we will take your request into account.
Then he says—the President said something about, "These people who are saying that the election isn't corrupt are," themselves, "corrupt."
There's "not much time left."
He asked for my cell phone number, which, again, he already had. But he said, I may have people call you with relevant information. I said, that's fine. You know, people are free to provide whatever information they may have, and we will treat it accordingly.
Then he said, "Senator Johnson has done a great job getting to the bottom of ​things. And that's been done in public, unlike the DOJ investigations." Because we've told him, look, there are things that are not public; that doesn't mean we're not doing our job.
Then, in Nevada, he made some reference to Nevada and said "forensic accounting shows we won by 250,000 votes."
Then he mentioned someone named "Mark Martin." He said he was a North Carolina Supreme Court justice. He's "retired." He's a real "scholar." He knows about this stuff.
And then he made a final comment about "'ballot drops' changed the election." He'd referenced this a number of times, that at 3 o'clock in the morning a whole bunch of ballots showed up in various swing States disproportionately in favor of Vice President Biden and that changed the outcome of the election.
Q All right.
How did the call end?
A It ran about 90 minutes or so after I was on, and then we sort of left it at that. The President made his points, we responded, and that was that.
Q I am just curious, Mr. Donoghue, about how you felt about this. You get off the phone call after 90 minutes with the President going through the allegations that you've just described. What was your overall reaction?
A I actually felt that, you know, in some way, it was a good opportunity to be able to say to him directly that we had done our job, we had looked at certain things, and that the information that he was being given was not true.
Because it was clear to me that a number of people had the President's ear. They were feeding him information. They were telling him things like, "This is obvious fraud. The Department's not doing its job. The Department's dropping the ball."
​And it gave us an opportunity to say in response that that wasn't the case, that we were doing our job. And I had hoped, certainly, that by giving him clear responses on some of these points that it would help the President understand that these allegations were not supported by evidence.
Q Was it your impression by the end of the call that that had worked, that he had been convinced that these allegations had no merit or that the Department and the FBI had, in fact, been doing their jobs?
A Not overall, necessarily. It was clear that he still believed that he'd won the election and that the different outcome was the result of corruption. But I think on some of these individual allegations he did accept it. So, when we pushed back on an individual allegation, as I said, he seemed to accept our explanation, but then he would move on to another allegation.
Q Yeah.
Did he mention any other person beyond those that are reflected in your notes? For instance, when he said, just say the election is corrupt and leave it to the Republican Congressmen, did he say who, specifically, those Republican Congressmen were?
A No.
Q If he mentioned a name, would it be reflected in these notes?
A Yes, I think so.
Q Okay.
All right. Let me pause there and see if, Ms. Cheney, if you or—I don't if anyone else from the committee is on—have any questions about this particular phone call.
Ms. Cheney. Thanks,
Yeah. Just to confirm, so this phone call is happening on December 27th. Is that right?
​Mr. Donoghue. Yes, ma'am.
Ms. Cheney. And, for context, the electoral college had met and voted on December 14th. And so, by the time of this phone call, we had had 50 Governors—Governors of each of our States had already certified the election results in each State.
Mr. Donoghue. Yes, that's right.
Ms. Cheney. Okay.
And so, you know, I guess you touched on this a little bit when you mentioned DAG Rosen saying the Department of Justice has nothing to do with this, you're free to bring suits. And, in fact, by this point, the President or his campaign had brought over 60 suits in State and Federal court in accordance with State laws, as the Constitution provides. In each of these States, they had already brought suit challenging the results, bringing these claims.
And so I just—in terms of this idea did that enter into your thinking? I mean, as we listen to you talk about the way you were describing for the President the fact that Department of Justice was investigating these claims, it really was the case that any legitimate claim had already been brought, had been adjudicated, as provided by State law, and, in fact, the electors had met and voted.
So I'm a little—I guess I'd like to understand a little bit more about, sort of, the open-ended nature of continuing to have the discussions about investigating fraud once the constitutionally prescribed system had taken place.