January 6 Committee Recommends DOJ Prosecute Trump For Four Crimes, Including Inciting Or Assisting An Insurrection

Trump is the first former president in US history to be referred for criminal prosecution.

Dec 20, 2022

For the first time in United States history, Congress has referred a former president to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution. (We’ll ignore the complete lunacy that none of the previous 44 presidents deserved to be prosecuted after they left office.)

On Monday, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 Capitol Insurrection has recommended that Donald Trump be charged with four crimes: (1) inciting or assisting an insurrection, (2) conspiracy to defraud the United States, (3) obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, and (4) conspiracy to make a false statement.

nikki mccann ramírez @NikkiMcR

Full reading of the recommended charges from the Jan. 6 committee, against Donald Trump, to the Justice Department.

Here is a list of all of the J6 Committee’s criminal referrals:

Inciting or Assisting an Insurrection
Donald Trump
Conspiracy to Defraud the United States
Donald Trump
Mark Meadows
Rudy Giuliani
John Eastman
Jeffrey Clark
Kenneth Chesebro
Obstruction of an Official Proceeding of Congress
Donald Trump
Jeffrey Clark
John Eastman
Kenneth Chesebro
Conspiracy to Make False Statement
Donald Trump
John Eastman
Kenneth Chesebro

Meadows was Trump’s final Chief of Staff and the other four men were lawyers for Trump.

The Committee also referred four members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee for failing to comply with the investigative committee’s subpoenas: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).

It’s far from the only criminal referrals that could be made. In its public hearings, the Committee shied away from identifying the numerous sitting members of Congress that evidence has shown played important roles in planning the attack.

The Committee released an executive summary of its final report (here). Its full report will be released later this week. The summary stated Trump was the primary cause of the mob violence that day.

That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.

Now it’s up to Rip Van Garland to wake up and prosecute Trump. However, based on Garland’s actions to date, it’s impossible to say if he will do anything.

DOJ Lawyers Are Cowards if They Don’t Indict Trump
Elie Mystal, The Nation, December 19, 2022

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol . . . unanimously voted to recommend former President Donald Trump be criminally charged for obstruction of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and insurrection. The Committee also released all of the depositions and other evidence it gathered over the course of its 18-month investigation . . .
Unfortunately, Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice is the law enforcement body responsible for holding the people who attacked the country accountable. Whether Trump is actually charged for the crimes the Select Committee laid out is, and has always been, up to the discretion of Garland and the DOJ. . . .
Whether Garland, newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith, Toonces the Driving Cat, or whoever the hell else Garland wants to pass the buck to uses their discretion to charge Trump with the crimes literally everybody saw and heard him commit is anyone’s guess. A nearly endless stream of institutional sycophants are all saying that the DOJ will take these criminal referrals seriously . . .
As so often happens, we’ve seen prosecutors use their discretion to charge the easy cases—such as the white supremacist foot soldiers in Trump’s attempted coup. But DOJ defenders might say that charging Trump—whether through their own investigation or the select committee’s referrals—is a much harder case.
That’s not really true. If the law did operate in a robotic fashion, Trump committed his crimes so publicly and brutishly that it’s not really hard to make out a case against him. If Trump escapes charges, it won’t be because the case against him was too hard to make. It will be because the DOJ used its discretion to be cowards.
Consider the three charges laid out by the committee. The “obstruction” charge—Title 18 Section 1512 c—says that it’s illegal to attempt to obstruct or impede an official proceeding of Congress. The entire point of Trump’s actions leading up to the attack on Congress was to impede the election certification process. He literally ordered his armed mob to march down to the Capitol in the hopes of intimidating Mike Pence, who was presiding over a closed session of Congress. That is… impeding a proceeding. This is the easiest thing to charge him with in the universe.
The charge for “defrauding” the American people—Title 18 Section 1001 and Title 18 Section 371—goes directly to his fake electors scheme. The statute at Section 1001 makes it illegal to “falsify, conceal, or cover up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact.” Section 371 is the “conspiracy” version of that, making it illegal to enter into a fraudulent scheme with a number of people. Trump and his cronies were out there pushing a scheme to submit electors that were not electors. This is fraud. Trump’s intent to use these electors to defraud the public is documented by the overwhelming number of people, including his own attorney general Bill Barr, telling him that he lost the election. Trump’s only defense, that he was listening to the advice of counsel like Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell is what I’ve called the “wino-defense.” Namely, you don’t get a pass on crimes just because you find a few lawyers off the street to tell you what you want to hear. If a wino-lawyer tells you not to pay your taxes, and you don’t, you’re still guilty of tax evasion. Again, this charge is not hard to make out.
The only criminal referral that is even a little bit tricky to charge is the “insurrection” charge. Under Title 18 Section 2383, it’s illegal, somewhat obviously, to incite or engage in a rebellion against the United States. Legal “incitement” can be a difficult standard. You have to show that Trump’s words produced an imminent threat of violence against the government, and that he knew his words would do so. I think it’s pretty clear that Trump did in fact incite the crowd to violence—what with all the violence the crowd did after his speech—but it’s a little harder to prove that’s what he wanted (even though that’s clearly what he wanted) than the other two charges.
But you take my point. Trump has spent every day since he lost the election committing these crimes, so of course he should be charged with them. . . .
Congressman Jamie Raskin said: “Ours is not a system of justice where the foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.” But he’s wrong. That’s exactly what our system of justice does all the time. The people who make the system of justice work that way are prosecutors, cowardly prosecutors who would rather bury a low-level, poorly represented criminal in a trucker hat under the jail than risk tangling with a well-funded, politically connected, openly guilty white man in a suit.
The decision is now in the hands of Garland and Smith. We don’t need them to be heroes. We don’t need them to be super lawyers. We need them to simply do their jobs.

The Committee released an executive summary of its final report: here. Its full report will be released later this week. The summary stated that Trump was the primary cause of the mob violence that day.

That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.

Trump’s outbursts on Troth Senchal in recent days have been deranged. The Very Stable Genius’s first comment after the criminal referrals were announced was this:

And then a little later:

To one of Dolt45’s points above, the Committee found absolutely no evidence Trump gave any order for any troops to do anything to protect the Capitol. In previous versions of this lie, Trump usually mentions 10,000 troops. In this post, he has magically doubled that number.

However, when the Committee interviewed Christopher Miller, Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense, it asked: “To be crystal clear, there was no direct order from President Trump to put 10,000 troops to be on the ready for January 6th, correct?”

Miller replied: “That’s correct. There was no direct—there was no order from the President.”

Wait — now he’s back down to 10,000 troops:

The ALL CAPS rants are starting early this afternoon/evening. I wonder how demented and unhinged he’ll be at 3:00 am. (I also wonder who typed this for him since there are no misspellings. And why is there a 38-minute gap between parts 1 and 2?)

The Committee also reported that Trump — who “persistently claimed and referred to election fraud that did not exist” — raised approximately $250 million Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021. During its meeting on Monday, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said Trump used some of those funds to “provide or offer employment to witnesses”.

It appears Trump is guilty of several counts of witness tampering.

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