Q: Mr. Donoghue, on December 27th, you had a 90 minute conversation with tie president where he raised false claim after false claim with you and Mr. Rosen. How did you respond to what you called a "stream of allegations?"
A: The December 27th conversation was, in my mind, an escalation of the earlier conversations as the former acting AG had indicated. There were a lot of communications that preceeded that. As we got later in the month of December, the president's entreaties became more urgent and more adamant that we weren't doing our job. He had this arsenal of allegations that he wanted to rely on. So I felt in that conversation that it was incumbent on me to make it very clear to the president what our investigations had revealed. And that we had concluded based on actual investigations, actual witness interviews, actual reviews of documents, that these allegations simply had no merit. I wanted to try to cut through the noise because it's clear to us that there were a lot of people whispering in his ear feeding him these conspiracy theories and allegations. I felt that being very blunt in that conversation might help make it clear to the president these allegations were simply not true. So as he went through them and what to me was a 90 minute conversation or so, to the former acting AG was a 2 hour conversation, as the president went through them, I went piece by piece to say "No, that is false. That is not true." And to correct him, really in serial fashion as he moved from one theory to another.
Q: Can you give me an example of one or two of those theories?
A: One that was very clear at that point was the Antrim County ASOG report that I mentioned earlier. Allied Security Operations Group (thus ASOG) released a report that said 68% error rate. There was, in fact, in Antrim County, a hand recount. Had nothing to do with the DoJ. The DoJ did not request that. That was pursuant to litigation brought by other parties, but there was a hand recount. So they were able to compare the hand recount to what the machines had reported. For the ballots that were actually counted by machine, more than 15,000, there was one error. One ballot. I did a quick calculation and came up with a .0063% error rate, which is well within tolerance. And so, I made very clear to the president, because he was so fixated on the ASOG report in the December 15th conversation, that, in fact, our investigation revealed that the error rate was .0063%. So that is a present example of what people are telling you is not true. And that you cannot and should not be relying on...
(God damn at this wild falsehood. Maybe someone involved in the initial report doesn't know how to calculate percentages and saw ".0068%" in some documentation about the machines and said that means there's a 68% error rate? That's the only way that makes sense to me.)
A (cont'd): ... We went through a series of others. The truck driver who claimed to had moved an entire trailer of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. That was also incorrect. We did an investigation had the FBI interview witnesses from the front end to the back end. Of that trailer's transit from New York to Pennsylvania, we looked at loading manifests, we interviewed witnesses, including of course the driver, and we knew it wasn't true. Whether the driver believed it or not, was never clear to me, but it's just not true. That was another one that I tried to educate the president on. There were a series of others, mostly in swing states of course. He wanted to talk a great deal about Georgia. The State Farm Arena video, which he believed for various reasons was, as he said it, "fraud staring at you right in the face."
Q: Were any of the allegations he brought up credible? Did you find any of them credible?
A: No.
Q: So during this conversation, did you take hand written notes directly quoting the president?
A: I did, and to make it clear, AG Rosen called me on my government cell phone. He said he had been on the phone with the president for some time. The president had a lot of these allegations. I was better versed in what the DoJ had done because I had closer contact with the investigations and the AG asked me to get on the call. Of course, I agreed. I began taking notes only because at the outset, the president made an allegation I had not heard. I had heard many of things, I knew many of them were investigated. But when the president, at least when I came onto the conversation and he began speaking, he brought up an allegation I was completely unaware of. And of course that concerned us, so I simply reached out and grabbed a notepad off my wife's nightstand and grabbed a pen and I started jotting it down. That had to do with an allegation that more than 200,000 votes were certified in the state of Pennsylvania that were not actually cast. sometimes the president would say it was 205,000, sometimes he would say it was 250,000. But I had not heard this before, so I wanted to get the allegation down clearly so that we could look into it if appropriate. That's why I started taking those notes. Then as the conversation continued, I just continued to take them.
Q: As we can see on the screen, you actually quote president Trump asking, "Where's DoJ," just like we heard him say in his television interview. How did you respond to that?
A: So both the acting AG and I tried to explain to the president on this occasion and on several other occasions that the DoJ has a very important, very specific, but very limited role in these elections. States. Run. Their. Elections. We are not quality control for the states. We are obviously interested in and have a mission that relates to criminal conduct in relation to federal elections. We also have related civil rights responsibilities. So we do have an important role. But the bottom line is that if the state ran their election in such a way that it was defective, that is for the state or congress to correct. It is not for the DoJ to step in. I certainly understood the president as a layman, not understanding why the DoJ didn't have at least a civil role to step in and bring suit on behalf of the American people. We tried to explain that to him. The American people do not constitute the client of the US DoJ. The one and only client of the US DoJ is the US Government. The US Government does not have standing, as we were repeatedly told by our internal teams, by Steve Engel, by the Office of the Solicitor General. They researched it and gave us thorough clear opinions that we simply did not have standing. We tried to explain that to the president on numerous occasions.
Q: You also noted that Mr. Rosen said to Mr. Trump that the DoJ can't and won't snap its fingers to change the outcome of the election. How did the president respond to that?
A: He responded very quickly and said, "That's not what I'm asking you to do. What I'm asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen."
My personal comments:
I really like this guy's testimony. He speaks clearly and concisely about what he's talking about. This is information that I didn't know about the DoJ's specific role as it relates to elections. I had also not considered that the DoJ's only client is the US government.
Transcription is a LOT harder to do with people like Richard Donoghue who 1) Have a lot to say and 2) Speak at a relatively quick pace.