Donald Trump hounded the Justice Department to pursue his false election fraud claims, contacting the agency’s leader “virtually every day” and striving in vain to enlist top law enforcement officials in a desperate bid to stay in power, according to testimony Thursday to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Watch Donoghue’s remarks in the player above.

Testimony centered on a tense Oval Office showdown on Jan. 3, 2021 in which Trump contemplated replacing the acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, with a lower-level official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to champion Trump’s bogus election fraud claims. Donoghue and another senior Justice Department official, Steven Engel, warned Trump that there would be mass resignations at the department if Trump followed through with his plan. Only then did Trump relent.

Clark’s name was referenced early in the hearing, with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, deriding him as a lawyer whose sole qualification was his fealty to Trump. A lawyer for Clark did not return an email ahead of the hearing.

WATCH: Every public Jan. 6 committee hearing so far

Three Trump-era Justice Department officials testified that Trump was fixated on voter fraud claims and insisted they pursue them despite being repeatedly told that none of the allegations had any merit.

“He had this arsenal of allegations,” said Richard Donoghue, one top Justice official. “I went through them piece by piece to say, no, they were not true.”

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