January 6 Committee outlines criminal referrals for Trump
Fox News congressional correspondent Chad Pegram has the latest on the January 6 Committee's investigation on 'America Reports.'
I don’t want to say the Jan. 6 committee’s final hearing was mostly old news, but much of the time was consumed by literally playing the greatest hits.
There was a video presentation yesterday that was just clips of the testimony the panel has taken over the past year and a half – as if to remind people of all the witnesses from its heyday. While Fox, CNN and MSNBC all carried the meeting, there was no pretense of any new evidence during the Christmas-week session.
The panel – all Democrats plus two anti-Trump Republicans – unanimously adopted the final report.
The hearings were at their strongest when Republican witnesses – from former Trump administration officials to state lawmakers – delivered the facts as they recalled them. This wasn’t liberal Democrats or Resistance journalists making the case, it was people who had served and supported Donald Trump – until the Capitol riot and his effort to overturn the 2020 election.
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The only thing that marred that testimony, in my view, was the Trump-is-guilty speeches that the committee members – led by chairman Bennie Thompson and vice chair Liz Cheney – would deliver before they got to the first-hand accounts.
There was, in truth, one new piece of business yesterday – the criminal referrals.
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at HoverTech International, Monday, Oct. 26, 2020, in Allentown, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (AP)
But even here, as it has done throughout its existence, the panel leaked that in advance.
I’ve never understood why the committee systematically funnels to the press all the news it plans to break. Once the media were filled with details of which criminal charges the panel would invoke against the former president, the only reason to tune in was to hear the speechifying.
JANUARY 6 COMMITTEE OUTLINES CRIMINAL REFERRALS FOR TRUMP
As telegraphed in advance, the panel is asking the Justice Department to look into criminal allegations that Trump incited an insurrection, conspired to defraud the U.S. and obstructed an act of Congress. A fourth one was tossed in: conspiracy to make a false statement.
Yes, it’s historic. Yes, no such referral has ever been made against a former president.
But it’s purely symbolic.
Dozens of Trump supporters gather outside Mar-a-Lago to protest the FBI's raid. (Alon Skuy/Fox News Digital)
The Justice Department is already investigating the hell out of Donald Trump.
The probe is looking at Jan. 6, the storing of top-secret documents at Mar-a-Lago and the pressure against state officials, a number of whom have been subpoenaed by the special counsel.
So what do the referrals really matter, beyond a chance for the soon-to-be-extinct panel to have its last moment in the television sun?
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) watch election results in a room with staffers at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. on November 8, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Sometimes a subcommittee will break new ground in an investigation and refer to Justice some allegations that are news to the department. That’s hardly the case here.
The panel also referred to Justice four GOP members of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas. They are Kevin McCarthy, who could become the next speaker in two weeks – how strange it that? – along with Andy Biggs, who’s challenging him, Jim Jordan and Scott Perry.
The committee also asked DOJ to look at Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, and attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Cheseboro.
And the panel posted a 100-page executive summary of its report, which in the end is almost entirely focused on Trump, as Cheney wanted.
The report emphasized, among many other things, that Trump watched the riot on television for hours, ignoring a deluge of pleas sent to Meadows, before finally asking his supporters to go home.
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"None of the events of Jan. 6th would have happened without him," the report says.
Without in any way diminishing the importance of what happened on that dark day – or how the top election deniers lost in the midterms – this might be receding into history except for one thing.
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Trump still constantly argues, to this day, that the election was stolen from him.
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