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What the Justice Dept. Could Do Now After Trump Criminal Referral


The House selection committee laid out an ambitious roadmap for the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump and several of his allies on Monday, saying they committed a number of federal crimes by implemented overlapping plans to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.

But it remains unclear how closely the special counsel’s office in charge of the Justice Department’s own investigation will follow the path outlined by the committee – or whether Mr. any criminal charges.

of the control board It is recommended that fees be introduced is based on a comprehensive investigation that spans months and includes interviews with key witnesses that even federal prosecutors may not have spoken to.

in presentation committee resultsRep. free.”

Mr. Raskin explained that charges had been secured against Mr. Trump and others – the chief of whom was an attorney. John Eastman, the architect of some of Mr. Trump’s plans to turn the tables. Nine months ago, Mr. Raskin noted, a federal judge in California, ruled in a civil case, conclude that there is evidence that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman conspired to commit a federal crime together.

As for the Justice Department’s efforts, there isn’t much publicly available about any particular allegation that the special counsel, Jack Smith, may be considered in a criminal prosecution. The Department has no obligation to adopt the committee’s conclusions or follow the committee’s recommendations.

However, there has been some overlap between the criminal statutes cited by the department and the charges proposed by the commission, search warrants and subpoenas that have gradually emerged during the federal investigation.

One charge that both the panel and the prosecutors focused on in their work was obstruction of a formal proceeding before Congress. The Justice Department mentioned that in an order used in June to Jeffrey Clark’s phone confiscateda former department official for whom the commission recommended criminal prosecution on Monday.

Prosecutors used the number of obstructions in nearly 300 criminal cases to describe how the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6 disrupted the certification of the election taking place there in one joint session of the National Assembly.

Although widely used, the statute has never easily matched the violence that erupted at the Capitol.

It was passed into law as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which limits corporate misconduct by tightly controlling things like shredding documents and tampering with witnesses. And defense attorneys have challenged its use in a federal appeals court in Washingtonargued that prosecutors had extended it beyond its original scope and used it to criminalize conduct akin to a First Amendment protected protest.

However, the amount of obstruction that can be applied to Mr. Trump’s conduct is much better than that of hundreds of ordinary rioters.

The law requires proof that any interference in congressional proceedings was done “in an improper manner”. The committee said in its recommendation that Mr Trump had clearly acted with “corrupt purposes” because he had been warned in advance that some of his attempts to maintain power were illegal.

The committee also recommended that Mr. Trump and others be charged with conspiring to defraud the United States, a charge that has been used in several Justice Department cases against both far-right extremists and extremists. ordinary rioters, who seem to have planned in advance to attack the United States. Capital.

Again, this conspiracy allegation could in fact better describe the evidence against Mr. Trump, who, according to the committee, misled the public by repeatedly making false claims that the election was rigged against him.

Another charge the committee recommends against Mr. Trump and others is conspiracy to make false statements. That number is warranted, according to the panel, because Mr. Trump was involved in a wide-ranging plan to send to Congress and the National Archives. fake electorate list claimed that he was a winner in several key states that Joseph R. Biden Jr had actually won.

The most serious charge the panel has recommended against Mr. Trump may also be the most difficult to prove: rebellion. While the Justice Department won a conviction on a related charge, conspiracy to sedition, against Stewart Rhodesleader of the Oath Keepers militia, and is about to try out five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boysfor sedition, it has not charged anyone with rebellion in more than 900 criminal cases.

However, a federal judge in Washington laid the groundwork for a potential rebellion case against Mr a ruling in February that allowed a series of January 6-related civil lawsuits against the former president to continue.

In his ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta said Trump was not merely exercising his First Amendment right to free speech when he appealed to the crowd listening to him on the January 6 march. to the Capitol and “fight like crazy”. .”

Judge Mehta also found that it was a reasonable case to make that Trump aided and abetted those in the crowd who attacked police on Capitol Hill – in part by waiting so long to do so. Publicly called for the rioters to calm down. One of the ways that prosecutors can prove that Mr. Trump participated in the uprising is to show that he has “aided and comforted” other insurgents who joined the uprising against the government.

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