The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection said on Thursday that Donald Trump heaped immense pressure on top leaders at the justice department, engaging in a “power play to win at all costs” that nearly succeeded in overturning the will of the American people.

Testifying at the committee’s fifth and final hearing of the month, three former justice department officials, recounted a dramatic Oval Office confrontation three days before the assault on the Capitol in which Trump contemplated replacing the agency’s acting head with an “completely incompetent” lower-level official who embraced his stolen election myth. Trump only relented, they said, when he was warned that there would be mass resignations at the department if he followed through with the plan.