The House Panel investigating the Jan 6 attack said for the first time on Wednesday that there may be evidence indicating that crimes have been committed directly by Donald Trump and his former associates.
The House Panel investigating the Jan 6 attack said for the first time on Wednesday that there may be evidence indicating that crimes have been committed directly by Donald Trump and his former associates.
NBC News reported, “The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol argued in a new court filing that former President Donald Trump and members of his campaign were part of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results.”
This conspiracy filed by the House panel aka “Criminal conspiracy” suggests that Trump and his associates tried to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College. The committee also wrote in the filing, “The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
The committee reached this point after John Eastman, a Trump-allied lawyer allegedly played a crucial and direct role in overturning the 2020 election results. He did so by first pressuring the former Vice President, Mike Pence in the form of a two-page memo, which indicated ways to exploit the ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act and put aside the Electoral College votes of seven states. Eastman also pressured states not to send in Democratic electors, even though the Democratic ticket won those states.
The House panel investigators had some questions in line for Eastman. But, when he sat down with the bipartisan committee, he pleaded the Fifth- some accounts suggest nearly 150 times. So then the panel subpoenaed Eastman’s records, mainly his emails from the time he worked with Trump to overturn the elections. And of course, given that he is a Trump-ally, he failed to block the panel’s efforts, claiming that the materials are protected by “attorney-client” privilege. According to the statement made by Charles Burnham, Eastman’s attorney, Eastman has a responsibility “to protect client confidences, even at great personal risk and expense.”
And this claim is what led the House panel to file a motion. The House panel argued that communications between an attorney and client are not protected if the discussions are about committing a crime. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chairman said in a statement, “The Select Committee is not conducting a criminal investigation. But, as the judge noted at a previous hearing, Dr. Eastmanโs privilege claims raise the question whether the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege applies in this situation.”
The House panel also said, “The Select Committee … has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
This is the first time the House panel has directly laid out in official, legal writing that Trump and his associates may have committed crimes. And those crimes involved Trump seeking to obstruct an official proceeding- the certification of the 2020 election results. How? By trying to delay Pence to move forward with the proceedings so that he could have enough time to manipulate the results.
There was an email exchanged on Jan 6 2021 between Eastman and Chief Counsel Greg Jacob, which showed that Eastman pushed Pence to intervene in the proceedings and halt the certification for electoral votes. Jacob replied, “I respect your heart here. I share your concerns about what Democrats will do once in power. I want election integrity fixed. But I have run down every legal trail placed before me to its conclusion, and I respectfully conclude that as a legal framework, it is a results-oriented position that you would never support if attempted by the opposition, and essentially entirely made up.” He also added, “And thanks to your bullsโ-, we are now under siege.”
The panel is expected to release the full findings or a series of reports later this year, ahead of the midterm elections. They also plan to begin hearing days or weeks of hearings starting this April with some witnesses who testified.