This week, the House Jan. 6 committee conducted its last hearing and issued its final report. And we’ve begun releasing the voluminous evidence gathered during the course of our investigation in the form of witness interview transcripts, exhibits, text messages, emails, videos and more.
It is on the basis of this evidence — not politics — that we have referred former President Trump to the Justice Department for potential prosecution for four offenses: two involving conspiracy charges, another concerning his obstruction of the joint session of Congress, and the most serious, covering his role in aiding and assisting the insurrection.
Not since Watergate has a congressional committee taken on such an important duty of oversight and accountability. But it will be up to Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith and the capable attorneys at the DOJ to provide justice.
For the four years of Trump’s presidency, the Department of Justice took the position that you cannot indict a sitting president. This is a flawed reading of the Constitution. There is no provision barring the indictment of the nation’s chief executive if they are engaged in criminal activity — even if, as a prudential matter, you would defer such a trial until the end of their term. But if the department now decides, after finding sufficient evidence to charge Trump with a crime, that it would be too controversial or too divisive to prosecute a former president, that would effectively immunize him or any future president from criminal liability. The founders would have never subscribed to such a dangerous proposition.
So the Justice Department must hold itself to the standard it set at the beginning of its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol: Follow the evidence wherever it leads. But there is more needed to protect our democracy than oversight, accountability and even justice.
There must also be reform. In the committee report, we laid out several steps that Congress must take to prevent another would-be autocrat from tearing down our democratic institutions and stopping the peaceful transfer of power.