The NY Times reported yesterday that the January 6th Committee is considering sending a criminal referral of Donald Trump to the Justice department.
According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.
I hadn’t heard about the wire fraud case, although that makes sense. (I would imagine it will be hard to prove they didn’t know their claims were not true.) But if I may toot my own horn, I can say I was aware for a while of the possibility of an obstruction case and wrote about just last week:
[W]e are seeing the contours of what the January 6th Committee may be leading up to: a criminal referral of Donald Trump for obstruction. Liz Cheney spelled it out on Monday during the Committee hearing to hold Meadows in contempt of congress:
Hours passed without necessary action by the President. These privileged texts are further evidence of President Trump’s supreme dereliction of duty during those 187 minutes. And Mr. Meadows’ testimony will bear on another key question before this Committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’ official proceedings to count electoral votes?
Journalist Marcy Wheeler explains that this seems to be following the same legal framework the DOJ is using to prosecute the most serious January 6th rioters. She writes, “Liz Cheney was stating that Trump’s actions on January 6 may demonstrate that he, along with hundreds of people he incited, had deliberately attempted to prevent the vote count.”
The language Cheney used tracks closely with those other cases, which is a clue that this is how they may be seeing this case going forward. The courts have so far been amenable to this interpretation of the law 18 USC 1512(c)(2) which makes it illegal to obstruct an official proceeding. Whether that holds up through the inevitable appeals process is yet to be determined, but when you look at the evidence it’s clear that Donald Trump spent weeks planning to do just that and when his followers resorted to violence to accomplish it, he sat on his hands for hours and watched them do it.
Marcy was on to this very early when she saw that the DOJ was using this somewhat novel approach to the January 6th prosecutions. As of today, we’ve seen the cases of four more defendants charged under this law pass muster in the courts.
I bring all this up because I think it shows that there is value in the kind of work we do here. Blogs like Marcy’s, or some of the newsletters, epidemiology twitter feeds etc, which are densely reported, provide highly detailed analyses of the important issues of our day while many magazines and websites give us deeply reported stories that illuminate our society. Needless to say, the mainstream news is the main source of information we get about the government and politicians. I read them all. And I think those of us who write daily, following the news cycle, riding the zeitgeist as we do while devoting the time to delve into the details, have a unique capacity to find the threads that bind all this together and synthesize them into an evolving story of our time.
If you come by here every few days, you’re going to get a pretty good snapshot of what’s going on in our political world from a progressive perspective.
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Happy Hollandaise everyone!