Talking Points Memo: “It was getting late in the day on Sunday, Jan. 3 in the Oval Office. Trump was arguing with top Justice Department officials over whether to fire the attorney general in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The conversation was interrupted, however: Trump wanted to make a call. ‘Get Bobby Christine on the phone,’ Trump thundered to an administrative assistant. The move bewildered Richard Donoghue, the deputy attorney general. ‘I didn’t understand where he was going with this,’ Donoghue recalled in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Less than two hours after the Sunday meeting concluded, Donoghue would be on the phone with U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, BJay Pak, telling him that he needed to resign immediately, and to do so quietly.”

“Bobby Christine, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, would be replacing Pak. Pak’s forced resignation came days before the Georgia special Senate elections, and after weeks in which Trump had pushed state officials to accept bogus claims as fact and award the state’s electoral votes to him. That culminated in a Saturday, Jan. 2 call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which Trump demanded that officials ‘find’ the votes for him to win. But the drama of Pak’s ouster and the effort to enlist the Justice Department in the election subversion played out over four crucial days in early January – from Saturday, Jan. 2 to Tuesday, Jan. 5. It was an extraordinary few days that saw Trump nearly hollow out the entire Justice Department by firing the attorney general and replace him with someone willing to fight to overturn Biden’s win. In the end, this story shows, it was only Pak who was forced to leave. Senate investigators confirmed that Pak was forced to resign because Trump ordered it out of a belief that the prosecutor was a ‘never-Trumper,’ while the report reveals new details about the manner in which Pak’s out-of-order replacement, Bobby Christine, was appointed.”