January 6th Committee makes clear in new court filings that it’s looking to put Donald Trump in prison

| 9:09 am EST March 3, 2022
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The January 6th Committee is still putting in the necessary work of interviewing cooperating witnesses behind closed doors, using that testimony to corner and flip non-cooperating witnesses, and building its full case against Donald Trump. This all has to happen before the committee can start putting these witnesses in front of the cameras and having them tell the story to the American public.

That said, plenty of details about the committee’s progress keep periodically surfacing. Some of those details have come from the committee members themselves, such as the multiple instances in which they’ve leaked to major news outlets that they’re looking to ultimately make a criminal referral against Trump to the Department of Justice. Now court filings reveal that this is indeed where the committee is headed.

The January 6th Committee recently made a court filing aimed at convincing a judge to allow Chapman University to turn over John Eastman’s emails to the committee. The university wants to turn over the emails but needs the court to rule that it’s allowed to do so against Eastman’s will. The committee will eventually win this battle; it’s a matter of time.

What’s important for now is that in the court filing, the committee argues that it has a right to the emails because Trump and Eastman were part of a “criminal conspiracy” to overthrow the 2020 election. The committee wouldn’t make a claim like this in a court filing unless it already has proof in hand, in case the judge asks for it. Moreover, the committee wouldn’t throw language around like this unless it intends to make a criminal conspiracy referral against Trump to the DOJ.

Because so many pundits have spent the past several months (baselessly) claiming to know that the DOJ will never criminally charge Donald Trump “no matter what,” some of you reading this are going to presume that when the DOJ receives the now-inevitable criminal referral against Trump, it’ll simply discard it. But that’s not reality. The DOJ has already criminally indicted Steve Bannon based on the criminal referral that the January 6th Committee made against him, so there’s clear precedent that the Garland DOJ is willing to act on any legitimate criminal referral it receives from the committee – and that would certainly include Trump.