During his final weeks in office, former President Trump asked then-Attorney General Bill Barr and other top Department of Justice officials to file a Supreme Court lawsuit to overturn the presidential election, but they refused, The Wall Street Journal reports. Trump’s lawyers went as far as writing a brief for Barr and others to submit but senior DOJ officials refused, according to the report. Courts struck down dozens of Trump’s legal team’s bogus attempts to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.

Top DOJ officials appear to have put their jobs on the line to protect the integrity of the department amid the chaos of the transition. Senior employees managed to prevent Trump from firing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen at the time and replacing him with a stronger ally—an idea Trump was entertaining—by promising a mass resignation if the former president went through with it.