[3] He led this office in the successful prosecutions of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, Keith Raniere, and Thomas Spota.
[4][5][6] It was also under Donoghue that the Eastern District of New York indicted Robert Sylvester Kelly on the first set of federal charges for which he was tried and ultimately convicted.
[7] Donoghue also led the District in the controversial decision to decline prosecution of Daniel Pantaleo for the death-in-custody of Eric Garner.
[12] It was announced that Jeffrey A. Rosen would become acting Attorney General on December 24, the day after William Barr's resignation took effect.
They testified about the pressure campaign by Trump and surrogates in the days between the 2020 presidential election and the 2021 United States Capitol attack.
[17][18] In addition to testimony, Donoghue provided contemporaneous notes memorializing conversations with President Trump.
The notes directly quote Trump ordering Donoghue to "just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.
On December 28, 2020, Clark emailed Rosen and Donoghue a draft letter which he reportedly had discussed with Perry, requesting they sign it.
[21][22] The letter had been emailed to Clark twenty minutes earlier by Ken Klukowski, senior counsel to Clark and a legal analyst for far-right Breitbart News; Klukowski had co-authored a 2010 book titled, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.
[23] Klukowski joined the Department of Justice in December 2020, with less than a month left of Trump's term.
The letter suggested the Georgia legislature should "call itself into special session for [t]he limited purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors".
On Sunday, January 3, 2021, Donoghue was unexpectedly summoned to the Oval Office for a meeting with President Trump.
Testifying about the meeting with the January 6 Committee, Donoghue recounted confronting Trump after he implied he could overcome Rosen's resistance to signing the Georgia letter (and attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election more generally) by simply replacing Rosen with Jeff Clark:[26]The conversation at this point had moved beyond the specific allegations, whether it was State Farm Arena or Antrim County or Pennsylvania or whatever.