The DOJ's top national security official seriously considered resigning amid Trump's pressure to overturn the election
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John Demers, the DOJ's top national security official, considered resigning amid Trump's pressure to overturn the election.
But Demers decided to stay on to oversee the department's day-to-day business.
He also told The Wall Street Journal he was "relieved" and "pleased" that the acting AG resisted Trump's pressure to overturn the election results.
John Demers, the Justice Department official who oversees the national security division, seriously considered resigning in January when then-President Donald Trump ramped up pressure on the department to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
"I didn't know what was going to happen, I thought that there was a real chance that would be my last day in the department," Demers told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.
Demers will leave the department at the end of June. His departure was pre-planned but comes amid news that the DOJ secretly seized the records of Democratic lawmakers and some journalists as part of aggressive leak investigations during the special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
Demers told The Journal that he thought about resigning in early January when Trump was threatening to fire the acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen, for not doing more to overturn the election results. But Demers stayed on because he didn't know who would oversee the agency's day-to-day business if he resigned along with other senior officials.
He went on to say that he was "relieved" and "pleased" that Rosen pushed back on Trump's repeated demands to overturn the election.
Indeed, the House Oversight Committee released a trove of emails last week that illustrated how alarmed Rosen and other top DOJ officials were by the Trump administration's efforts.
At one point, Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly asked DOJ officials to investigate claims of purported voter and election fraud.
In a January 1 email to Rosen, Meadows asked the department to look into a YouTube video in which a retired CIA intelligence officer named Brad Johnson made broad, unverified claims that the US embassy in Rome somehow switched votes from Trump to Biden during the election. The baseless conspiracy theory, dubbed "ItalyGate," caught fire in right-wing circles in the days and weeks after the election, and Johnson was one of its key promoters.
Rosen forwarded Meadows' email to then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, to which Donoghue replied, "Pure insanity."
Rosen responded to Donoghue saying, "Yes."
He went on to say that after Meadows emailed him the YouTube video, he was asked to have the FBI meet with Johnson.
"I responded that Johnson could call or walk into FBI's Washington Field Office with any evidence he purports to have," Rosen wrote in the email, which appears to be a contemporaneous memo, a type of document that law enforcement and intelligence officials use to detail their knowledge of significant or legally dubious interactions.
"On a follow up call, I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as 'an insult,'" Rosen continued. "Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his 'witnesses,' and re-affirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this."
In another January 1 email, Meadows asked Rosen to have the acting assistant attorney general, Jeff Clark, to investigate "signature match anomalies" in Fulton County, Georgia.
"Can you get Jeff Clark to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation," Meadows wrote.
Rosen also forwarded that email to Donoghue and wrote, "Can you believe this? I am not going to respond to message below."
Read the original article on Business Insider
