It would appear to some that the House Committee HAS been making a pitch to get The US Attorney General to empanel a Grand Jury to pass up Criminal charges against ex-President Donald J. Trump….
A tension is developing….
The Jan. 6 select committee made its most forceful case Thursday that Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was more than an affront to the democratic process — it was a crime.
For all the panel’s public quibbling over whether to vote on referring Trump to the Justice Department for a possible criminal case, members did it their own way. They used Thursday’s public hearing to present what they see as some of their most compelling evidence and thereby mount a case, with Attorney General Merrick Garland watching, that Trump broke the law in his effort to make former Vice President Mike Pence single-handedly overturn the election…
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The select committee has long emphasized its belief that Trump’s actions amounted to a crime. It asked U.S. District Court Judge David Carter in March to invalidate Eastman’s claims of attorney-client privilege over thousands of emails, in part by suggesting some fell under the “crime-fraud” exception. Carter agreed, and issued a ruling — cited over and over again by the committee in its first three public hearings — saying Trump and Eastman “likely” entered into a criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress.
That ruling laid out a blueprint for the panel’s potential criminal case against Trump.
However, DOJ on Thursday suggested the select committee was actually impeding its efforts to investigate the Capitol attack. In a blistering letter dated June 15, senior department leaders accused the Jan. 6 panel of complicating its work via a “failure” to provide prosecutors access to more than 1,000 transcripts of witness interviews. The frustration goes both ways, as the select committee has vented about the department’s refusal to act on criminal contempt referrals of key witnesses in their investigation.
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DOJ has indicated it would share those transcripts with defense attorneys as soon as it receives them, a factor that the select committee may be considering as it decides when to share its evidence…