About a week before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, there was an "escalation" of then-President Donald Trump's earlier demands about election fraud allegations, a former top official in the Justice Department testified Thursday, including an "arsenal of allegations that he [Trump] wanted to rely on."

In testimony before the House select committee investigating the insurrection, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard said he told Trump "based on actual investigations, actual witness interviews, actual reviews of documents that these allegations simply had no merit."

In a 90-minute conversation on Dec. 27, 2021, Donoghue said he went one by one through claims of fraud to debunk them for Trump.

Among those theories was a report about Dominion voting machines having a 68% error rate in a Michigan county — which turned out to be false — and that the report was transmitted to U.S. attorneys in Michigan on Dec. 14 for their awareness.

The next day, Trump pressed the DOJ that the report must be true and proved that he had won the election. He also said the Justice Department should use the report to tell the public the election was tainted.

"I did the quick calculation and came up with .0063% error rate, which is well within tolerance," Donoghue testified. He said he assured the president that the report citing the significantly higher error rate was not true.

Other theories included debunking the belief that a trailer carried ballots from New York to Pennsylvania.

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