US atty. who refused election-fraud claims said Trump was due to fire him
- A US attorney for Atlanta who suddenly resigned in January said he did so under threat of being fired by Trump.
- Byung J. Pak told congressional investigators of the pressure he was under to find voter fraud.
- The closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee lasted three hours, per the NYT.
A former US attorney in Atlanta who abruptly resigned in January said he did so because then-President Donald Trump was about to fire him over his refusal to back claims of election fraud, The New York Times reported.
Byung J. Pak made the disclosure in a three-hour, closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, The Times reported.
Pak said Justice Department officials had warned him of the threat in January, The Times reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Pak told the committee that he had vetted Trump’s claims of fraud in Georgia, but had found no evidence backing them up, the paper reported.
Pak had resigned abruptly from his role as the Northern District of Georgia’s US attorney with no explanation on January 4. It soon after emerged that the Trump administration had pressured him to do so because he had refused to investigate allegations of voter fraud in Georgia.
Trump had, two days earlier, complained about a Georgia “never Trumper” — apparently referring to Pak — in a now-infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In that call, Trump had pressured Raffensperger to “find” votes to tip the state, which Joe Biden won. Raffensperger refused.
A January report from The Wall Street Journal said that a senior DOJ official had called Pak and suggested he step down, while the Times reported that Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue had called Pak to express Trump’s frustration at his refusal.
But Trump’s intention to actually fire Pak otherwise only emerged with Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, according to The Times.
Pak’s reported experience in Georgia follows revelations over the intense pressure the DOJ was under in January to add weight to the baseless voter-fraud allegations.
On Saturday, former Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen testified for seven hours to the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to its chair, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin. Durbin told CNN that Rosen had revealed “a lot” about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“It really is important that we ask these questions because what was going on in the Department of Justice was frightening from a constitutional point of view,” Durbin told the network.
Durbin said Trump was intensely personally involved in the effort, and that the pressure he put on Rosen was “very real, and it was very specific.”
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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