STEVEN ENGEL: Yeah. No, I — I think when the president — my recollection is that when the president turned to me and said, Steve, you wouldn’t leave, would you, I said, Mr. President, I’ve been with you through four attorneys general, including two acting as attorney general, but I couldn’t be part of this. And then the other thing that I said was that, you know, look, all anyone is going to sort of think about when they see this — no one is going to read this letter.
All anyone is going to think is that you went through two attorneys general in two weeks until you found the environmental guy to sign this thing. And so, the story is not going to be that the Department of Justice has found massive corruption that would have changed the result of the election. It’s going to be the disaster of Jeff Clark.
And I think at that point Pat Cipollone said, yeah, this is a murder suicide pact, this letter.
Transcript from the fifth Jan. 6 committee hearing on its investigation
There’s a bunch of stuff on this exact topic in the transcript of the 5th hearing, but the above quote is the meat of it. Engel, Donoghue, Herschmann, and Cipollone (I may be missing someone) convinced Trump that appointing Jeff Clark as AG would harm Trump more than it would help him.
They ripped Clark to shreds in front of Trump. Made him look weak. This is the kind of argument that Trump responds to. He hates the appearance of weakness and no longer wanted weak Jeff Clark to be his AG.
Another quote:
RICHARD DONOGHUE: I made the point that Jeff Clark is not even competent to serve as the Attorney General. He’s never been a criminal attorney. He’s never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He’s never been in front of a jury, much less a trial jury. And he kind of retorted by saying, well, I’ve done a lot of very complicated appeals in civil litigation, environmental litigation, and things like that.
And I said, that’s right. You’re an environmental lawyer, how about you go back to your office and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill. And Pat Cipollone weighed in at one point. I remember saying, you know, that letter that this guy wants to send, that letter is a murder suicide pact. It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter.
“You’re an environmental lawyer, how about you go back to your office and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill,” is one of my favorites.