The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol has postponed its Wednesday hearing slated to review former President Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to investigate his unfounded claims of election fraud.
In an advisory, the committee said its scheduled hearing on Thursday would still take place but provided no other details.
Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue and Steven Engle, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, were all expected to appear before the committee on Wednesday.
Rosen and Donoghue were some of the committee’s earliest witnesses to voluntarily testify before the panel’s investigators and also spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee for a report it released in October.
“In our third hearing, you will see that President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims,” Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said during the committee’s first prime-time hearing last Thursday to preview its coming work.
“In the days before Jan. 6 President Trump told his top Justice Department officials: ‘Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.’”
Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department was reported just days after President Biden took office in a New York Times report detailing a remarkable meeting during which Trump said he would install a mid-level lawyer as his attorney general in order to forward an investigation into election fraud claims in Georgia and other states.