Revealed: DOJ has lined up multiple January 6th defendants willing to admit Donald Trump incited Capitol attack
Is the Department of Justice building a criminal case against Donald Trump in relation to the January 6th Capitol attack and his overall attempt at overthrowing the 2020 election? No one knows. These kinds of federal criminal cases are essentially always built from the bottom up, meaning it was going to take the DOJ quite some time to get to Trump even if it is aiming for him.
Some legal pundits have recently insisted that if the DOJ were indeed building any sort of case against Trump, we’d be seeing evidence of it, because some aspect or other of the investigatory work would leak out. Even if the DOJ were being tight lipped, sooner or later some witness or defendant would decide to reveal that the DOJ is targeting Trump, the popular theory goes.
Now something has indeed surfaced. Buried several paragraphs deep into a new article from the New York Times, we find this bombshell:
“In plea negotiations, federal prosecutors recently began asking defense lawyers for some of those charged in Jan. 6 cases whether their clients would admit in sworn statements that they stormed the Capitol believing that Mr. Trump wanted them to stop Mr. Pence from certifying the election.”
What’s notable about this revelation, which was first flagged here, is that it does in fact appear to have only become public knowledge because it’s surfaced in the guilty pleas of several defendants. In other words, the tight-lipped Garland DOJ has been obtaining these sworn statements about Trump from defendants as they plead guilty, but had been keeping it close to the vest until it was no longer possible to keep it from surfacing.
This doesn’t prove that the DOJ will bring criminal charges against Donald Trump. But it does seem to prove that the DOJ is building a criminal case against Trump, to the point of lining up witnesses who are formally accusing him in their own guilty pleas of having incited the Capitol attack to try to overthrow the election. If the DOJ were to build a case against Trump, this is exactly how it would go about building it. So much for the notion that the DOJ is doing “nothing” about Trump; it’s now clear that there’s plenty of “something” going on.
