'Star witness' emerges as hearings over Trump's attempt to delegitimize election grow closer: report

As hearings over former President Donald Trump's attempts to reverse the 2020 election results could potentially start as early as this week, Richard P. Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general under Trump, has emerged a potential star witness, The Washington Post's Aaron Blake writes.

As Blake points out, Donoghue's name repeatedly appears in notes and emails pushing back against Trump's efforts to delegitimize the election he lost.

Donoghue's potential testimony could include details of notes he wrote during a December meeting with Trump where the former president Trump urged the Justice Department to "just say the election was corrupt" and to "leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen."

"The other big revelation this week involves a highly unorthodox draft letter from [then-head of the Justice Department's civil division, Jeffrey Clark]. In it, Clark sought to urge the Georgia state legislature to call a special session to look at potentially overturning the election results in their state," Blake writes. "As The Washington Post's Philip Bump wrote, the proposed letter appears to be the latest in a series of thinly veiled attempts among Trump allies to lay a predicate for getting Congress not to accept the election results Jan. 6."

But as Blake points out, Donoghue again flatly objected.

"He wrote in response that the alleged 'irregularities' Clark based his draft letter upon 'are of such a small scale that they simply would not impact the outcome of the Presidential Election,'" Blake writes. "He also said, even setting that aside, that it was hardly the Justice Department's business to urge a state legislature to take such actions based upon investigations the department generally would never comment upon."

Read the full report over at The Washington Post.