Two years after riots took over the US Capitol, the Justice Department’s sweeping criminal investigation into efforts to block a peaceful transition of power enters a new phase, with the special counsel adding two right-wing prosecutors to an experienced team that will ultimately decide whether to impeach the former president. Donald Trump or his allies should face trial.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has returned to the US after spending the past month working remotely in Europe while recovering from a bicycle accident.
It is adding two members who specialize in long-standing corruption cases, according to a person familiar with the matter: Raymond Hulser, the former head of the DOJ’s public integrity division, and David Harbach, who led the prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell.
The expansion under Smith strengthens the bureau’s ability to look into broad conspiracy cases and determine investigative avenues, another source said. They join a team of more than 20 DOJ prosecutors, as well as senior counsel brought into the department in recent months, who were already investigating Trump and his allies.
Despite assurances from Attorney General Merrick Garland that Smith’s appointment will not slow down the dual Trump-related investigations, establishing his office is taking time. Smith’s team is still working to find a permanent physical office, but has begun switching email addresses for employees who previously used regular Justice Department accounts.
Harbach was seen by CNN Thursday taking the stand in federal court in D.C., speaking with another special prosecutor about extremist group cases and briefly participating in a seditious conspiracy trial of the Oath Keepers.
According to the Department of Justice, more than 950 defendants have been arrested for their involvement in the riots of January 6, 2021, and more than 500 have been found guilty. Four people died in the attack, including rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a Capitol police officer, two members of the crowd who suffered heart attacks and one who died of an overdose. According to the DOJ, 140 officers were injured that day and five officers died in the months following the uprising: one by beating and four by suicide.
Smith and his new team inherit the Jan. 6 probe at a crucial time, as the public understands better the former president and his allies to try to keep Trump in the Oval Office, but also while congressional investigators enforce the limits. their powers
And when the House select committee hit brick walls in its investigation — including tough witnesses who claimed privilege, or, like Mark Meadows, bailed out halfway through cooperating with congressional investigators — DOJ prosecutors working under Smith will now have some tools to dismantle those obstacles. . They include ongoing legal proceedings to pierce the shroud of secrecy that normally surrounds the president.
The special counsel also has a wealth of evidence to comb through, including evidence recently presented by the House’s Jan. 6 committee, subpoenas issued by local officials in key states and discovery from Trump’s lawyers. the allies engaged in a flurry of activities late last year, some of which have yet to be reviewed, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Smith himself sent subpoenas to election officials in seven battleground states and received a wealth of material. The Michigan secretary of state’s response includes an email from a county official reporting two voicemails he received from people seeking access to voting equipment in December 2020. One call was written by a secretary who said he works on Trump’s post-election legal team.
As Trump’s direct involvement in efforts to block his 2020 election certification becomes clearer, investigators may also face obstacles if they try to build a case against the former president.
“They will get to the colonels, but they may not get to the general,” Michael Moore, the US attorney in the Obama administration, told CNN.
Eyewitness emails, text messages and Jan. 6 House committee testimony show Trump’s role in pushing electoral rolls, pushing battleground state officials to overturn election results, seeking to replace the acting attorney general with someone who would admit to claims of election fraud. the grounds for calling his followers to the Capitol at first.
“POTUS’s hope is to have something intimate on the ellipse and call everyone to come to the capitol,” rally organizer Katrina Pierson wrote in an email days before the Capitol attack.
But the transcripts of the interviews released by the committee also reveal loopholes that could hamper federal investigators, witnesses with mixed memories and testimony to avoid Trump’s technology.
“My father does not use text messages or e-mail,” Donald Trump Jr. told congressional investigators in his interview. As for the other messaging apps, “I’m not sure he even knew what they were,” Trump Jr. said.
Trump’s style of asking ambiguous questions rather than direct requests was also visible to state officials to overturn election results. “One thing I remember is that he never, to my recollection, ever asked a specific question,” said former Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey of Michigan. “They were always just general issues.”
The committee’s investigation has provided a fuller and more nuanced picture of the interconnected plots being investigated by the DOJ, including the scheme Biden won to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to present lists of illegal Trump voters in battleground states. stop the certification of results.
Campaign staff testified that Trump was behind the push for the maneuver, and the panel gathered other evidence that Trump was in the loop about its operation, including a phone call to RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.
According to the evidence gathered by the commission, many state-based operatives and fraudulent elected officials were themselves in the dark about the end of the gambit. Several of them believed they were gathering surrogate voters as a contingency plan in case Trump prevailed in a legal case that changed the outcome in their state.
Meanwhile, top Trump campaign officials distanced themselves from the effort after the election’s last significant challenge – a far-reaching Supreme Court petition – ended on December 11, 2020.
For those who continued to work on the scheme with congressional certification in mind, “the DOJ would have a much easier case to prove,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University School of Law professor and former Defense Department adviser.
The commission has testified that a group of Trump’s legal advisers – including former Wisconsin state judge Jim Troupis and attorney Kenneth Chesebro – were reviewing congressional certification when they launched the fraudulent voter scheme.
A memo outlining the Dec. 9 plan suggests that those advisers viewed the surrogates as decisive in the event of a court ruling overturning Trump’s electoral loss, but only if “a state legislature” or “Congress” deemed Trump voters valid. .
Trump and his allies may face further criminal exposure beyond the DOJ investigation, as prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election there. Atlanta District Attorney Fani Willis has labeled people who served as Trump voters in Georgia as “targets” in her investigation, along with notable Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani.
While the commission made the historic move to refer Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, it also named a number of Trump allies as potential co-conspirators in its latest report. One of them was former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
“It was pretty obvious that the former president was at the center of this conspiracy, but certainly many others contributed, including … Mark Meadows and the like,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who served on the committee.
Meadows comes up repeatedly in the commission’s investigation, with evidence showing that he was involved at some level in every attempt to overturn the election. Some of the most telling evidence came from Meadows himself: he sent thousands of text messages to the commission before he stopped cooperating with the investigation.
The texts show that starting on Election Day, Meadows activists were pushing conspiracy theories and connecting activists with GOP lawmakers and rally organizers preparing for Jan. 6. He thought they were the most “sophisticated” and “credible”.
Meadows and Giuliani, Trump’s one-time lawyer, were involved in the first conversations about putting up fake voter rolls, according to testimony given to the committee by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.
Transcripts released by the commission also reveal that Hutchinson testified before the commission how Meadows regularly burned documents in his fireplace a dozen times — once or twice a week — between December 2020 and mid-January 2021.
After producing the texts to congressional investigators, Meadows shifted gears and failed to appear before the House for subpoenaed testimony. A lawsuit he filed to challenge the subpoena was unsuccessful, but the Justice Department decided not to impose criminal penalties for his lack of cooperation.
The committee noted in its summary of its report that prosecutors may have access to materials that lawmakers did not have, citing Meadows in particular.
“In fact, the Department of Justice and the Fulton County District Attorney may now have access to witness testimony and documents that have not been available to the Committee, including testimony from President Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and others who claimed privilege or invoked their Fifth Amendment rights,” he said. summaries
“As far as the president is concerned, he didn’t commit a crime, so there shouldn’t be any charges related to him,” said Timothy Parlatore, one of Trump’s lawyers.
Parlatore insisted that Trump and his team “didn’t want to overturn the will of the people, just to make sure the will of the people was accurately counted,” adding that Trump was “absolutely opposed” to the violence at the US Capitol. .
Meadows’ attorney declined to comment.
