January 6 Committee Turns Its Attention To GQP Congressional Coup Plotters

Things are about to get interesting. The biggest seditious conspiracy against the United States government since the Civil War is about to be investigated by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was an inside job by the Republican Party in thrall to an authoritarian mad man, President Donald Trump.

The Washington Post reports, House Jan. 6 committee seeks information from GOP Rep. Perry about communications with Trump White House officials:

The House select committee investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 sent a letter Monday to Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) requesting that he provide information that could be crucial to the panel’s examination of efforts to overturn the election.

The letter from committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) cites Perry’s efforts to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, in the role of acting attorney general as reason for seeking Perry’s voluntary cooperation with the committee.

Perry introduced Clark to President Donald Trump, according to a report released by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. Clark went on to play a key role in Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results.

Thompson also cites evidence of Perry’s “multiple text and other communications with President Trump’s former Chief of Staff regarding Mr. Clark,” according to the letter.

“We also have evidence indicating that in that time frame you sent communications to the former Chief of Staff using the encrypted Signal app,” writes Thompson.

Perry, who led the objection to certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes won by Joe Biden, has emerged in recent weeks as the leading conduit for House Republicans involved with Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The text message sent to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and first revealed by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the select committee, asking him to “Please check your signal” was sent by Perry, according to two sources familiar with the documents provided by Meadows.

[T]he letter to Perry is the first significant action the committee has taken with regard to obtaining information from a sitting member of Congress. A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop the affirmation of Biden’s win over Trump, an attack that resulted in the deaths of five people and injuries to some 140 members of law enforcement.

Thompson, who also asked that Perry meet with the committee at the end of the month or at the beginning of next year, has previously said that the panel will not be reluctant to subpoena any member of Congress “whose testimony is germane to the mission of the select committee,” if they resist cooperating voluntarily.

UPDATE: GQP’s Perry Rebuffs Jan. 6 Panel. Just issue the subpoenas, there will be no cooperation from these traitors.

Still, legal experts said there is little precedent for forcing lawmakers to testify as part of a congressional inquiry in the event that they resist a subpoena.

There is no precedent for a political party and its members of Congress engaging in a seditious conspiracy and aiding and abetting a coup d’etat by a president of their party. Saving the Republic requires new legal techniques to meet the exigency of the moment.

Investigators have collected evidence from former acting deputy attorney general Richard P. Donoghue, acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and others on the nature of the relationship between Perry and Clark, according to Thompson’s letter to Perry.

“When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his 5th Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics,” Thompson added.

The January 6 Committee has its work cut out for it. There are 147 Republican lawmakers who still objected to the election results even after the Capitol attack in furtherance of the coup memos drafted by Trump lawyers John Eastman and Jenna Ellis (and possibly DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Clark). Some of these Republicans are co-conspirators in the seditious conspiracy, participating in the planning and organization of the failed coup d’etat. Some of them aided and abetted the seditious insurrections. All of them provided aid and comfort to the violent MAGA/QAnon domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol to interfere in the official government function of certifying the Electoral College vote from the 2020 election. These are all felony crimes. All 147 Republicans should be referred for prosecution and removed from office.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1473118873302056961

The New York Times reports, Jan. 6 Committee Weighs Possibility of Criminal Referrals:

[As the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol] investigators sifted through troves of documents, metadata and interview transcripts, they started considering whether the inquiry could yield something potentially more consequential: evidence of criminal conduct by President Donald J. Trump or others that they could send to the Justice Department urging an investigation.

That move — known as sending a criminal referral — has no legal weight, as Congress has little ability to tell the Justice Department what investigations it should undertake. But it could have a substantial political impact by increasing public pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who in his first year in office has largely sidestepped questions about what prosecutors are doing to examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud.

The questions of criminality go far beyond the contempt of Congress referrals that the House has sent to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation. (Federal law requires prosecutors to bring contempt of Congress charges before a grand jury upon receiving such a referral.)

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.

Oooh, I love this wire fraud claim against the Republican National Committee and its affiliated campaign finance organizations. That opens the door to a racketeering charge for a criminal enterprise under RICO.

The obstruction of Congress they are looking at was outlined in a court opinion from last week. As Jennifer Rubin explains, A federal court has ruled that obstructing the electoral vote count is illegal. Trump should panic.

U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich ruled last week that an effort to interrupt the counting of the electoral votes can be a crime — even if no violence was contemplated.

The judge made a critical finding that the counting of the electoral votes in the House is an “official proceeding.”[18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)]. Her logic is airtight: “There is a presiding officer, a process by which objections can be heard, debated, and ruled upon, and a decision — the certification of the results — that must be reached before the session can be adjourned. Indeed, the certificates of electoral results are akin to records or documents that are produced during judicial proceedings, and any objections to these certificates can be analogized to evidentiary objections.”

Because the defendants’ plan to violently enter the Capitol and disrupt the counting was “independently criminal,” she wrote, the defendants could be prosecuted for obstruction. In other words, they knew what they were doing was illegal. The judge — no doubt aware of the larger audience — added that “other cases, such as those involving lawful means … will present closer questions.” That might, for example, involve someone who raised spurious objections to the electoral votes or urged a state to devise an alternative slate of electors.

What does this say about other defendants should Friedrich’s reading of the corruption law hold up? It is a blockbuster: If President Donald Trump and his cronies sought to stop the House proceedings (for example, by extorting Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, inducing election state officials to commit fraud or pressuring the Justice Department to declare the election fraudulent), they too might find themselves on the wrong side of an obstruction charge.

“This December 10 Friedrich opinion does indeed seem important to me,” constitutional legal scholar Laurence Tribe tells me. Whether it is an obstruction charge — or a charge of sedition or conspiracy to commit sedition (under either sections 2383 [Rebellion or Insurrection] or 2384 [Seditious Conspiracy] of Title 18 of the U.S. Code) — Tribe observes that the principal obstacle to prosecution has been “the argument that the electoral count certification in the Joint Session of Congress is too ministerial to count as an official proceeding.” However, Tribe concludes, “This federal court opinion undercuts that line of argument.”

[Neal Katyal] concludes that “Judge Friedrich’s decision, at bottom, is a how-to manual, demonstrating how government officials, including President Trump, can be criminally indicted.”

The Times continues:

It is not clear what, if any, new evidence the committee has that might support a criminal referral, when and how it will determine whether to pursue that option and whether the committee could produce a case strong enough to hold up against inevitable accusations that it acted in a partisan manner.

Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.

In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.

She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.

“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”

The question is one of the most significant to emerge in the first six months of the investigation.

[The January 6 Committee] plans to hold televised hearings early next year to lay out for the public how the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement helped lead to the Capitol riot. And it ultimately may propose changes to federal laws, toughening statutes to rein in a president’s conduct and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to exploit in his attempt to cling to power.

One of the challenges the committee faces is that so much has been reported about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and the attacks themselves. So far, the numerous disclosures about the role of Mr. Trump, his aides and others who promoted the baseless idea that the election had been stolen from him have had little impact on his Republican support in Congress.

But a credible criminal referral could provide the committee an opportunity to underscore the gravity of what happened while potentially subjecting Mr. Trump and others to intensified legal scrutiny.

Although congressional investigators have no powers to charge a crime, their ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify allows them to reveal new details about events. At times, that process leads to witnesses disclosing potential criminality about themselves or others.

When that occurs, Congress can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department — often in the form of a public letter — that can increase pressure on the department to open investigations. Sometimes members of Congress, amid partisan squabbling, overstate the evidence of criminality and make referrals to the Justice Department that are ignored because they appear political.

Congressional investigations also create problems for witnesses because it is against the law to make false or misleading statements to Congress. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, indicted Roger J. Stone Jr. in 2019 for lying to congressional investigators examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and for obstructing that inquiry. Mr. Stone was ultimately convicted and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.

[At] a hearing this month, Ms. Cheney suggested that the committee could subpoena Mr. Trump to answer questions and that criminal penalties would hang over his head if he lied.

“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” she said. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, said it was “certainly possible” that the panel would make criminal referrals before the investigation concluded.

“Most of the criminal referrals that I’m aware of, judging from experience in the Russian and Ukrainian investigations, were perjury-related or witness intimidation-related,” he said. “But it’s not unprecedented for Congress to make referrals when we are aware of evidence that people engage in other criminal activity. I wouldn’t exclude that possibility.”

One option being examined by the committee, as Ms. Cheney revealed, is whether there is evidence to make a referral of Mr. Trump or others based on an obscure obstruction charge that federal prosecutors have been using to pursue rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6: the disruption of Congress’s duty to certify the final stage of a presidential election.

18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2):

(c) Whoever corruptly—

(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

That charge, which has been used in lieu of more overtly political counts like sedition or insurrection, has been brought against more than 200 rioters.

As part of their effort to weigh whether the charge would be warranted, the committee is trying to glean what it can about what Mr. Trump was saying behind closed doors about what he believed from those who were working with him in the months after Election Day last year, the people briefed on the inquiry said.

The committee is also examining whether there is enough evidence to make a wire fraud referral over how Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party raised $255.4 million from donors as he and his allies fund-raised off the false claim that the election had been stolen.

The line of inquiry has already created questions about whether people associated with the campaign have criminal exposure and created tension between witnesses and investigators. In November, the committee subpoenaed the chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, Bill Stepien, to testify. Along with the subpoena, the committee sent Mr. Stepien a letter raising the possibility that he was aware that the campaign was raising money by making false claims about election fraud.

“As manager of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, you oversaw all aspects of the campaign,” the letter said. “You then supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fund-raising. That messaging included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.”

[T]he committee is also looking at Sidney Powell [Krazy Kraken Lady], one of the lead lawyers in Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, who leads an organization that raked in money as she and Mr. Trump spread the lie of widespread election fraud. Her organization, Defending The Republic, raised $14.9 million between December 2020 and July. Ms. Powell’s group has more than $9.3 million in funds on hand, according to an independent audit filed with Florida, which investigated the organization and alleged multiple violations of state law.

So far, Mr. Garland has avoided making substantive public statements about the issue. In a House hearing in October, he declined to answer questions about whether the Justice Department was investigating Mr. Trump and his allies for their role in the Capitol attack.

The Justice Department’s prosecutions stemming from its vast investigation of Jan. 6 — an inquiry that has resulted in slightly more than 700 arrests — have so far concentrated almost exclusively on those who were on the ground at the Capitol that day, breaching barricades, breaking windows or fighting with the police.

The department appears to be building its cases from the ground up, starting with those it can accuse of definable crimes and looking for potential links to others. But it remains unclear whether prosecutors are trying to build cases against people further up the political hierarchy or connecting the attack to Mr. Trump and the aides and supporters who worked with him to overturn the results.

The DOJ needs to move with greater speed. Time is of the essence. These traitors need to be charged and prosecuted promptly.