Jan. 6 Committee seems likely to send criminal referrals on Trump to DOJ

It’s looking more and more that the House Jan. 6 Committee will soon be making criminal referrals to federal prosecutors in its investigation into former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Apparently feeling the heat, Trump is rumored to be considering announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2024 cycle, bucking the tradition of would-be candidates to wait until after the midterm elections.

That would seem to give Democrats an opening to make the midterms a referendum on Trump, who lost the 2020 election by more than 7 million votes, adding momentum for Democratic candidates to the firestorm coming from the left and center-left over recent Supreme Court decisions overturning abortion rights and climate change regulations and breaking down the church-state separation.

There are political considerations to be made regarding a possible criminal referral against Trump, which would be unprecedented, though of course no one who has held the nation’s highest political office had ever before attempted to reverse the results of a contested election, as Trump and his inner circle schemed to do in the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat.

Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, the House Jan. 6 Committee’s vice chair, said Sunday that the panel will make a decision as a group about possible criminal referrals, calling last week’s testimony by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson regarding Trump’s actions before the Jan. 6 attack attack on the U.S. Capitol led by a large group of Trump supporters “very chilling.”

“The Justice Department doesn’t have to wait for the committee to make a criminal referral, and there could be more than one criminal referral,” Cheney said on ABC’s “This Week.”

California Democrat Adam Schiff said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Justice Department would be wrong to decide against pursuing charges against Trump just because he is a former president.

“You know, for four years, the Justice Department took the position that you can’t indict a sitting president” Schiff said. “If the department were now to take the position that you can’t investigate or indict a former president, then a president becomes above the law.”