WASHINGTON – Top Justice Department leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their colleagues, they said, had worked out a plan with President Donald J. Trump to remove Jeffrey A. Rosen from the position of interim attorney general and exercise his departmental power of power Georgia’s lawmakers overturn the presidential election results.
The unpretentious lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been finding ways to cast doubt on the election results and to strengthen Trump’s continuing legal battles and pressure on Georgian politicians. Since Mr. Rosen refused the president’s pleas to execute these plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.
The department officials, meeting on a conference call, asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen gets fired?
The response was unanimous. They would resign.
Their informal pact helped persuade Trump to keep Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over the mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention to his baseless allegations of electoral fraud. Trump’s decision came only after Rosen and Clark presented their competing cases to him at a bizarre White House meeting that two employees compared to an episode of Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice”, although one that could lead to a crisis constitutional.
The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-standing effort to force the Department of Justice to advance its personal agenda. He also pressured Rosen to appoint special advisers, including one who would investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an electoral equipment maker that Trump’s allies falsely said was working with Venezuela to turn Trump’s votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
This account of the department’s last few days under Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Mr. Clark said that this report contained inaccuracies, but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversation with Mr. Trump or the lawyers at the Department of Justice. “Senior Justice Department attorneys often provide legal advice to the White House as part of our obligations,” he said. “All of my official communications were consistent with the law.”
Clark also noted that he was the main signatory to a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject an action that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results.
Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “the rampant electoral fraud that has plagued our system for years”.
The consultant added that “any statement to the contrary is false and is made by those who wish to keep the system broken”.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Rosen.
When Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought he could allow Rosen a brief postponement before putting pressure on electoral fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would stay for another week.
Instead, Mr. Trump called Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to present legal documents supporting his allies’ lawsuits to reverse his electoral defeat. And he urged Rosen to appoint special councils to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread electoral fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machine company.
(Dominion sued pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted these charges in four federal lawsuits over voter wrongdoing that were rejected.)
Mr. Rosen refused. He said he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and reiterated what Mr. Barr said in particular to Mr. Trump: The department investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.
But Trump continued to pressure Rosen after the meeting – over the phone and in person. He repeatedly said he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence to support the conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had defended. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.
While Mr. Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue resisted, they did not know that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and told the president that he agreed that the fraud had affected the election results.
Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s natural and environmental resources division.
In the course of December, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet – a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed in the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also said that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious allegations of electoral fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.
As Trump focused more and more on Georgia, a state that narrowly lost to Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the United States attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election allegations. promoted by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Donoghue warned Pak that the president was now focused on his job and that it might not be sustainable for him to continue to lead him, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
That conversation and Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to “find” votes for him forced Pak to abruptly resign this month.
Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He wrote a letter that he wanted Rosen to send to Georgia state lawmakers, erroneously stating that the Justice Department was investigating allegations of electoral fraud in his state and that they should overturn Biden’s victory there.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.
On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to reach the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue categorically told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen – who coached him while working together at the Kirkland & Ellis law firm – that he would discuss his strategy with the president early the following week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.
Without the knowledge of the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline has increased. He met Trump over the weekend and informed Rosen at noon on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Clark, who could try to stop Congress from certifying the results of the Electoral College. He said Rosen could continue as his assistant attorney general, leaving Rosen speechless.
Not wanting to resign without a fight, Rosen said he needed to hear directly from Trump and worked with White House lawyer Pat A. Cipollone to call a meeting earlier that evening.
Just as Clark’s speech was sinking, impressive news broke out from Georgia: state officials recorded an hour-long call, published by The Washington Post, during which Trump pressured them to fabricate enough votes to declare him the winner. As the consequences of the recording ricocheted in Washington, the president’s desperate attempt to change the outcome in Georgia came into focus.
Rosen and Donoghue moved on, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s legal advisory office, about Clark’s latest move. Mr. Donoghue called a late afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, outlining Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.
Rosen planned to go to the White House soon to discuss his fate, Donoghue told the group. If Rosen were fired, everyone agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Nixon Saturday Night Massacre, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned instead of following the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.
The Clark plan, officials concluded, would seriously damage the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they eagerly exchanged messages and called each other while waiting for Mr. Rosen’s fate.
At about 6 pm, Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy, Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark to present their arguments to him.
Cipollone advised the president not to fire Rosen and he reiterated, as he had done for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel informed Mr. Trump that he and the other senior officials in the department would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone in the department.
Trump seemed somewhat shaken by the idea that firing Rosen would not only cause chaos in the Justice Department, but also Congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and divert attention from his efforts to overturn election results.
After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump finally decided that Mr. Clark’s plan was going to fail and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.
Mr. Rosen and his assistants concluded that they withstood the turbulence. Once Congress certified Biden’s victory, there would be little to do until they left with Trump in two weeks.
They began to exhale days later, when the certification of the Electoral College on Capitol Hill began. And then they got the word: The building had been breached.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.