For months, the House Select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been patiently and meticulously amassing information about the lead-up to one of the darkest days in American history — which they’ve done despite Donald Trump shoving key documents down the toilet. They have yet to make public their findings thus far, and they still have more work to do. But they can say this: They have enough evidence already to more or less confidently state that the former president engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
As per The Daily Beast, lawyers representing the committee filed a legal brief in California that laid out a theory of how a criminal case could be made against the nation’s 45th president. The evidence they’ve acquired over hundreds of interviews — many done voluntarily by former Trump staffers — strongly suggests that Trump, conservative lawyer John Eastman, and other allies broke numerous laws in an attempt to keep the former in power.
The reason the brief was filed at all was thanks to Eastman, who became infamous as the professor who laid out a convoluted strategy for how Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election — a scheme the former vice president ignored, thanks in part to, of all people, Dan Quayle. The committee had requests documents from Eastman. Eastman argued that those documents were too confidential to release and that they violate executive privilege. So the committee responded by arguing that what Trump and he did was illegal.
“Evidence and information available to the committee establishes a good-faith belief that Mr. Trump and others may have engaged in criminal and/or fraudulent acts, and that [Eastman’s] legal assistance was used in furtherance of those activities,” the committee’s filing read. “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, Plaintiff [Eastman], and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.”
In the brief, the committee also argued that Trump was attempting to stop an “official proceeding,” i.e., Congress’ counting of each state’s electoral votes. That is, Trump could face the same criminal charge prosecutors have used against around 240 insurrectionists.
On top of that, the brief also accuses Trump of trying to obtain false election certificates.
Again, this legal brief was only filed because Eastman is refusing to surrender key documents.
The Jan. 6 committee cannot itself charge Trump and allies with crimes. What they can do is pass this to the Department of Justice. And they probably still have to talk to Ivanka.
(Via The Daily Beast)