The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one more federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.
The action, the first time in U.S. history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.
The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.
The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.
Trump attacked the committee as “highly partisan” before a final meeting the panel held Monday to release an executive summary of its final report on the Capitol attack and to vote on referring the former president to the Justice Department.
Republicans, who have vowed to investigate the committee after they take control of the House in January, mounted a modest response. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, was one of the few to react with a statement, accusing the committee of staging a “partisan charade.”
The executive summary, a 154-page narrative of Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election, identifies co-conspirators who aided Trump. But it singles out the former president as the primary cause of the mob violence.
“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary stated.
This story first appeared in New York Times
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