Opinion: The Justice Dept. and the Jan. 6 inquiry make moves to snare Trump - Rubin
Those criticizing Attorney General Merrick Garland for not moving expeditiously against former president Donald Trump for an attempted coup should take heart.
On Wednesday, we saw a matter-of-fact announcement from the Justice Department: “A regional leader of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty today to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding for his actions before, during and after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His and others’ actions disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election.” The announcement continued: “Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol breach. As part of the plea agreement, James has agreed to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation.” The definitions of his crimes (seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding) are precisely the ones that may best fit Trump’s behavior both before and on Jan. 6.
Also on Wednesday, the House Select Committee filed a brief in a court case disputing the attorney-client privilege raised in response to a subpoena by John Eastman, the lawyer who authored the infamous memo explaining how Trump could ignore the electoral count in President Biden’s favor. In a written statement the committee revealed, “The facts we’ve gathered strongly suggest that Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
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A conspiracy to impede the transfer of power could include, for example, promulgating the big lie, strong-arming Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to flip the state, pressuring Michigan election officials not to certify the vote for Biden, organizing fake electors, cajoling Vice President Mike Pence to disregard the electoral count, badgering the Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt,” working with congressmen to raise baseless objections to the electoral votes — and, ultimately, exhorting a mob to march on the Capitol when Congress was tabulating the electoral votes. Critical to that conspiracy was obstructing the congressional proceedings that officially would have announced Biden’s victory.
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From the committee’s statements, the latest plea deal and the other seditious conspiracy charges, we see signs that the House and the Justice Department are proceeding along common legal theories that they both agree fit the general fact pattern. If the facts necessary to implicate Trump and his top advisers emerge, the Justice Department will be hard pressed to decline to prosecute.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/03/seditious-conspiracy-plea-jan6
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The Justice Department is working from the bottom up, as it would in an investigation of organized crime. Here the innocuous announcement that James “has agreed to cooperate” should serve as a flashing red light to Trump and his cronies, especially those aides who allegedly staked out a “command center” at the Willard hotel on Jan. 6. Knitting together the leaders of the mob on the Mall with the Trump cohorts involved in a “corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power,” as the Jan. 6 committee put it, will be critical to tying Trump to the violent insurrection.
In a speech a year after the attack on the Capitol, Garland tried to assure the public that the Justice Department was neither dragging its feet nor ruling out prosecution of Trump. “In complex cases, initial charges are often less severe than later charged offenses. This is purposeful, as investigators methodically collect and sift through more evidence,” he said. “The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last. The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.” He added, “We will follow the facts wherever they lead.”
Yes!