January 6th Committee Recommends Criminal Charges Against Donald Trump

Ted Johnson
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UPDATE: The January 6th Committee recommended that the Justice Department pursue four criminal charges against former President Donald Trump along with others they claim helped orchestrate an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The charges include obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement and inciting, assisting or giving aid or comfort to an insurrection.

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It will be up to the Justice Department to decide whether to file charges, but the move is the first time that a former president has faced a criminal referral such as this one.

Rep,. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who outlined the recommendations, also named for potential prosecution John Eastman, the college professor who pushed an effort to install “fake” electors in advance of the joint session of Congress to certify the election results.

Raskin said that others were also involved, but the committee was unable to fully discern their role as they declined to testify. “We trust that the Department of Justice will be able to make a more complete picture,” Raskin said.

The committee also recommended that four members of Congress face sanctions for failing to comply with a subpoena. They include House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ).

As the committee adjourned its final hearing, the audience in the room clapped. Members then walked as the room grew silent, save for the clicks of cameras.

The committee’s executive summary is here. The final report is expected to be released later this week.

Raskin told reporters after the hearing that he “feels satisfied that we have a very good sense of what happened. There’s some little things I want to know. [During the attack on the Capitol] President Trump was in his dining room ordering hamburgers. And I just wonder whether he was actually eating hamburgers while he was watching the insurrectionary violence unfold against our country.”

“That was a small detail, but in terms of the big questions, those relate to the future, those relate to what we are going to do as a society in the 21st Century to make sure that America remains a strong bastion of democracy for ourselves and for the people around the world.”

One major unanswered question is who planted pipe bombs at the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee on that date.

He said that even though the committee did not refer charges of interference with witnesses or obstruction of justice to the DOJ, they still believe it needs to be pursued.

“We’ve wanted to proceed where we feel the evidence is overwhelming or abundant or certainly sufficient to go forward,” he said. “Not throw out dozens of charges. We are very focused on what we actually know.”

PREVIOUSLY: As the January 6th Committee presented some of its key findings, members also presented some newly gathered evidence.

That included excerpts of testimony from Hope Hicks, the longtime adviser to Donald Trump, who said that as the then-president pursued his claims of election fraud, she was “becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy.”

His response, Hicks testified, was “something along the lines of no one will care about my legacy if I lose.”

The committee also presented a text exchange Hicks had with Hogan Gidley, who was working for the Trump campaign, as the attack unfolded on January 6th.

“Hey. I know you’re seeing this. But he really should tweet something about Being NON-violent,” Gidley said.

“I’m not there,” Hicks wrote. “I suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused.” She did not make the suggestion to Trump personally but to White House attorney Eric Herschmann. But he also made the same request and Trump declined.

The committee also presented claims that efforts were afoot by Trump and his team to offer employment to witnesses as a way of swaying their testimony. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said that Trump did extensive fundraising off his false claims of election fraud, and then some of the money was used to provide or offer jobs or to hire lawyers to influence them. Lofgren’s claim, though, was somewhat vague.

“We learned that a client was offered potential employment that would make her financially ‘very comfortable’ as the date of her testimony approached by entities that were apparently linked to Donald Trump and his associates,” Lofgren said.

PREVIOUSLY: The January 6th Committee met for its final official public proceeding on Monday, one expected to include a vote on a criminal referral to the Justice Department of charges against former President Donald Trump.

Such a move would be a dramatic if expected finale for the committee’s proceedings, which have exceeded expectations in their ability to draw attention with a steady stream of bombshells over the extent to which Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The committee also planned to issue recommendations to make sure that such an attack on the Capitol never happens again. Committee chairman Bennie Thompson said that “we remain in strange and uncharted waters” and that “nearly two years later, it is still a time of reflection and reckoning.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s vice chair, said that among the “most shameful” of findings was that Trump declined and even refused to act for hours as the Capitol was being invaded, and instead sat in the Oval Office dining room and watched the events unfold. She called it a clear dereliction of duty.” She called Trump, now running for president again, “unfit for any office.”

“No man who would behave that way at that moment in time can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again,” Cheney said.

Major broadcast and cable networks carried the committee’s proceedings.

The committee likely will be dissolved when Republicans take control of the House next month. Two of its members, Cheney and Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), lost their bid for reelection. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) did not run for reelection.

The legacy of the committee will likely be in its recommendations to the Justice Department and in its final report, expected to be released on Wednesday. Thompson said that the bulk of materials gathered through 18 months of investigation will be released by the end of the year. The report likely will make the case that the attack on the Capitol was not spontaneous, but was the result of weeks of pre-planned effort, led by Trump, to reverse the election results.

NBC News reported earlier on Monday that the committee planned to ask the Justice Department to pursue at least three criminal charges against Trump, including obstructing an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the government and inciting or assisting an insurrection. In the weeks after the attack on the Capitol, Trump was impeached for a second time by the House, but he was ultimately acquitted after a Senate trial.

The Justice Department has been conducting a concurrent investigation of the events of January 6th, with Jack Smith now spearheading the case as special counsel.

CBS News’ Robert Costa also obtained audio from the testimony of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. A congressional investigator asked Flynn about whether he pressured military and intelligence officials to assist him in an effort to overturn the election results. Flynn took the fifth.

The committee was meeting in the same stately room it has been since it launched the hearings back in June. There was one difference: the Cannon Caucus Room has been renamed the Nancy Pelosi Caucus Room, for the outgoing Speaker who has been a driving force behind the proceedings and making them much more viewer-friendly than a regular congressional proceeding.

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