January 6th Committee makes clear that it intends to put Donald Trump in prison
While the notion that the DOJ is doing “nothing” about Trump world is absurd on its face, none of us have any way of fully knowing just what the DOJ is doing behind the scenes. There are confirmed DOJ criminal cases against the likes of Steve Bannon, the Oath Keepers leadership, and Rudy Giuliani. And there have recently been breadcrumbs pointing to the DOJ at least trying to build a case against Donald Trump himself – but no one knows how serious the DOJ is about actually indicting Trump.
To that end, the January 6th Committee isn’t taking any chances. According to a new report from the New York Times, the committee has adopted “mafia” style prosecution tactics behind the scenes, in order to bust Trump’s underlings and force them to flip on Trump. Of course Congress can’t actually prosecute anyone. But when the committee made a solid criminal referral to the DOJ against Bannon, the DOJ indicted him just three weeks later. So the committee has good reason to believe that if it makes a solid enough criminal referral against Trump for election-related and insurrection-related crimes, the DOJ will feel compelled to indict Trump for it, whether the DOJ was already planning to indict Trump or not.
It’s worth underscoring the fact that the DOJ could already be deep into the process of building a criminal case against Donald Trump, and that the DOJ could intend to bring criminal charges against him regardless of what the January 6th Committee does or doesn’t do. For instance, over the past month the DOJ has begun having Capitol attackers, in their guilty pleas, formally attest that Trump incited them to do it. And of course Trump is already on track for state prison in New York and Georgia. But finishing off Trump is important enough that the January 6th Committee can’t leave anything to chance – and so, to extend the mafia metaphor, the committee is going to hand the DOJ a criminal case against Trump that it can’t refuse.
