The congressional committee investigating last year’s violent attack on the US Capitol has voted to recommend that the US Justice Department pursue criminal charges against former President Donald Trump for his role in the failed insurgency.
During its final public hearing on Monday, the nine-member bipartisan panel unanimously said Trump should be prosecuted for aiding the insurgency, obstructing an official government proceeding, conspiring to defraud the US and making false statements to authorities.
“We’ve never had a president of the United States who led a violent attempt to block the transfer of power. I think, almost two years later, this is still a moment of reflection and reckoning,” Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the panel, said at the start of the hearing.
“There is one factor that I think is the most important to prevent another January 6: accountability,” he added. “The evidence we’ve gathered points to more action . . . accountability that can only be found in the criminal justice system,” he said.
Details of the criminal charges were laid out by Congressman Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, who said John Eastman, a former Trump lawyer, and other allies of the former president should also face criminal charges in connection with the riots. . “Ours is not a justice system where the foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and gang leaders get a free pass,” Raskin said.
The congressional panel’s final proceedings and recommendations are likely to deepen the former president’s legal woes as he makes a new bid for the White House. The Justice Department, where special counsel Jack Smith has taken over federal investigations of the former president, will make the final decision on whether to indict him. Smith’s office declined to comment.
The committee also referred four Republican lawmakers, including House leader Kevin McCarthy, to a bipartisan House ethics panel for refusing to cooperate with its investigation, including failing to comply with subpoenas.
The vote is the culmination of the panel’s efforts to shed light on Trump’s complicity with the mob that stormed the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority except one. January 6, 2021 was the first time an American president denied his constitutional duty to peacefully transfer power to the next ” said Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is vice chair of the court.
“No man who would behave in this way at that time can ever again hold any position of authority in our nation,” he added. “He is unfit for any office.”
The panel’s latest burst of activity comes as Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican party is called into question after many of his favored candidates lost high-profile races in the midterm elections. Polls show Republican voters are growing wary of supporting him for another term in the White House in the 2024 presidential primary.
Trump and his many Republican allies in Congress have attacked the committee’s work as a politically motivated witch hunt. But Democrats, independents and some Republicans have defended the panel’s work as essential to protecting democracy and ensuring accountability for the riots.
“You follow the law and you follow the evidence and that’s pretty clear [Thompson and Cheney] I’ve done both of those things,” Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator from Ohio, told NBC on Sunday. “I support what they’re doing. I think they have shown courage.”
The committee’s work is winding down because Republicans are poised to regain control of the House in early January, and their leadership has long opposed it.
Several members of the committee, including Cheney, have either lost their own re-election bids in the House or decided to resign from Congress.
Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who is a member of the panel and did not seek another term in Congress, explained his own motivation for filing a criminal referral against Trump with the Justice Department earlier this month.
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“The criminal references themselves are not necessarily something that will awaken the DoJ to something that they didn’t know before, but I think it will be an important and symbolic thing that the committee can do,” Kinzinger told ABC. would make it “very clear” that Congress believes “a crime has been committed.”
But some Republicans argue that moving forward with criminal charges against Trump would be unnecessary. “I think if they really want the Justice Department to do their job objectively, they shouldn’t be making referrals. You think the Justice Department doesn’t know what happened on January 6th? They’re doing their own investigation with independent counsel.” , Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, told ABC.
“This is politics at play here making the references. And I think it’s politics that really hurts the cause of getting to the bottom of who is responsible for January 6th and making sure they are held accountable,” he said. added
Elaine Luria, a Democratic member of the court who lost her seat in the midterms, recalled the trauma of Jan. 6 in her closing remarks on the House floor last week as she defended the panel’s work.
“On that day, January 6, 2021, lives were lost, these hallowed halls were desecrated and our democracy was put to the test,” he said.