Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said on Sunday that they had found enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider an unprecedented criminal charge against former President Donald Trump in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. .
“I would like the Justice Department to investigate any credible allegations of criminal activity by Donald Trump,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who is also a member of the committee that chairs the Intelligence Committee. of the House. “There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to cancel the election that I see no evidence that the Department of Justice is investigating.”
The committee held its first public hearing last week, with members exposing their case against Trump to show how the defeated president has steadily pushed his false claims of a rigged election despite several advisers telling him the contrary and how he intensified an extraordinary plan to overturn Joe Biden’s decision. victory.
Additional evidence will be presented this week at hearings showing how Trump and his advisers made a “massive effort” to spread misinformation and pressured the Justice Department to accept his false claims.
Committee members said Sunday that his most important hearing during the hearings could ultimately be Attorney General Merrick Garland, who must decide whether his department can and should prosecute Trump. They left no doubt as to whether the evidence is sufficient.
“Once the evidence is accumulated by the Department of Justice, it must make a decision on whether it can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt the guilt of the president or anyone else,” Schiff said. “But they have to investigate if there’s credible evidence, which I think is.”
Deputy Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Said he did not intend to “challenge” Garland, but noted that the committee has already filed in the legal allegations a variety of criminal statutes that Trump believes rape.
“I think he knows, his staff knows it, U.S. lawyers know what’s at stake here,” Raskin said. “They know the importance of this, but I think they are rightly paying close attention to the precedents of the story as well as the facts of this case.”
Garland has not specified how he could proceed, which would be unprecedented and could be complicated in a season of political elections in which Trump has openly flirted with the idea of running for president again in 2024. “We will continue the facts there where they take us “. Garland said in his speech at the Harvard University graduation ceremony last month.
A California federal judge said in a March ruling in a civil case that Trump “most likely not” committed federal crimes in an attempt to obstruct Congress from counting Electoral College ballots on January 6, 2021. The judge cited two statutes: obstruction of an official procedure and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Trump has denied all allegations.