January 6 panel to vote on recommending criminal charges against ...

The congressional panel probing last year’s attack on the US Capitol will consider recommending criminal charges against Donald Trump for fomenting the riot, deepening the former president’s legal woes as he mounts a new bid for the White House.

This week, the committee of House of Representatives lawmakers investigating the January 6 2021 attack on Congress will conclude its work with a public hearing and the release of a final report.

According to people familiar with the committee, which is led by Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney, a Republican, the panel is on Monday likely to vote on referring criminal charges against Trump to the US Department of Justice. The DoJ, where special counsel Jack Smith has taken over the federal investigations of the former president, will make the final decision on whether to indict him.

The vote is the climax of the panel’s efforts to shed light on Trump’s complicity with the mob that stormed the Capitol in order to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

The panel’s last burst of activity comes as Trump’s chokehold on the Republican party is being called into question after many of his preferred candidates lost high-profile races in the midterm elections. Polls show that Republican voters are growing wary of backing him for another term in the White House in the 2024 presidential primaries.

The committee’s work has been attacked by Trump and his many Republican allies in Congress as a politically motivated witch hunt. But Democrats, independents and some Republicans have defended the panel’s work as essential to protecting democracy and ensuring accountability for the riot.

“You follow the law and you follow the evidence and it’s pretty clear that [Thompson and Cheney] have done both of those things,” Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democratic senator, told NBC on Sunday. “I support what they’re doing. I think they’ve shown courage.”

Recommended

The committee’s work is winding down because Republicans are set to regain control of the House in early January, and their leadership has long been opposed to it.

A number of members of the committee, including Cheney, have either lost their own re-election bids in the House or decided to step down from Congress.

Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who is a member of the panel and did not seek another term in Congress, explained his own motivation for submitting a criminal referral against Trump to the justice department earlier this month.

“The criminal referrals themselves aren’t necessarily something that is going to wake DoJ up to something they didn’t know before, but I do think it will be an important, symbolic thing that the committee can do,” Kinzinger told ABC, saying it would make “very clear” that Congress believes “a crime has been committed”.

But some Republicans argue that moving ahead with criminal referrals against Trump would be unnecessary. “I think if they really want the justice department to do their job objectively, they should not do referrals. You think the justice department doesn’t know what happened on January 6th? They’re doing their own investigation with an independent counsel,” Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, told ABC.

“This is politics at play here by doing the referrals. And I think it’s politics that really hurts the cause of getting to the bottom of who’s responsible for January 6th and to make sure they’re held responsible,” he added.

Elaine Luria, a Democratic member of the panel who lost her seat in the midterms, harked back to the trauma of January 6 in her final speech on the floor of the House last week as she defended the panel’s work.

“On that day, January 6 2021, lives were lost, these hallowed halls were desecrated, and our democracy was tested,” she said.