The House committee collected a TON of stuff…
Much more than the Justice Dept. up to now….
The committee is sitting on a stockpile of nearly 1,200 witness interview transcripts and reams of hard-won documents about Donald Trump’s attempt to derail the peaceful transfer of power. While the select panel’s nine members gathered on Monday to refer evidence of Trump’s potential crimes to the Justice Department, that raw information — not the showmanship of a final in-person public meeting — will tell the story the committee has labored to piece together.
The 160-page executive summary, which precedes a final panel report set for release as soon as Wednesday, hints at the extraordinary range of documents the committee collected. It references at least 30 “productions” of documents from various witnesses and agencies, including White House visitor logs, Secret Service radio frequencies and the Department of Labor, where then-Secretary Eugene Scalia produced a Jan. 8, 2021, memo seeking to call a Cabinet meeting to discuss the transfer of power.
“The select committee intends to make public the bulk of its nonsensitive records before the end of the year,” the panel’s chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), said Monday. Thompson has stressed that the taxpayer-funded investigation’s materials should be made available to the public: “These transcripts and documents will allow the American people to see the evidence we have gathered and continue to explore the information that has led us to our conclusions.”….
Speculation on the Justice Dept. case’s….
As for the Justice Department’s efforts, not much is publicly known about any specific charges that the special counsel, Jack Smith, might be considering in a criminal prosecution. The department is under no obligation to adopt the committee’s conclusions or to follow its recommendations.
Still, there has been some overlap between criminal statutes cited by the department and the charges the committee recommended, according to search warrants and subpoenas that have gradually surfaced during the federal inquiry.
One charge that both the panel and prosecutors have placed at the center of their work is obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress. The Justice Department mentioned that count in a warrant used in June to seize the cellphone of Jeffrey Clark, a former department official whom the committee referred for criminal charges on Monday.
Prosecutors have already used the obstruction count in nearly 300 criminal cases to describe how the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place there during a joint session of Congress….
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The most serious charge the panel has recommended against Mr. Trump is also likely to be the hardest to prove: insurrection. While the Justice Department has won a conviction on a related charge, seditious conspiracy, against Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and is set to try five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, for sedition, it has not charged anyone with insurrection in more than 900 criminal cases.
Still, a federal judge in Washington laid the ground for a potential insurrection case against Mr. Trump in a ruling in February that permitted a series of Jan. 6-related civil cases filed against the former president to move forward…
The House Committee and the Justice Dept. have had a bit of a rocky time……
Some ex-prosecutors were even more dismissive of the Congressional referral.
“I think a referral will have zero practical effect on what DOJ does,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal public corruption prosecutor in Washington. “They are already investigating, and they’re not going to decide whether or not to charge based on whether they got a referral from Congress.”
Just last month, Attorney General Merrick Garland emphasized prosecutors wanted to see the House’s evidence, but he notably omitted any desire to see what conclusions lawmakers reached about what that evidence proved.
“We would like to have all the transcripts and all of the other evidence collected … by the committee, so that we can use it in the ordinary course of our investigations,” Garland told reporters gathered in his conference room at DOJ headquarters.
In some ways, the House’s new criminal referral could have less impact than others Congress has sent to the Justice Department in the past. That’s because while some referrals spur DOJ into action, prosecutors already have investigations open into the main areas where the Jan. 6 committee sees potential crimes: Trump’s alleged incitement of the attack on the Capitol and his prolonged effort to undermine the 2020 presidential election results….
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One aspect of the committee’s referral that could lead to fresh action by prosecutors is the panel’s claim that some witnesses may have testified falsely and that Trump or others may have obstructed the Congressional probe….
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Despite the show the House panel made Monday of cooperation with the Justice Department, there have been tensions between the Hill and DOJ. Prosecutors have been asking for nearly eight months for access to the panel’s work, with lawmakers essentially stonewalling the DOJ request.
Prosecutors and the House panel were in informal talks for the past year or so, punctuated by more formal requests beginning in April of this year.
Tensions in that process boiled over in June, when top prosecutors publicly accused the committee of undermining current and future prosecutions by denying access to records showing what witnesses had told the panel….