The committee 6/1 of the US House of Representatives approved the final conclusions and unanimously voted to request the indictment of the former president Donald Trump for four federal felonies, including inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of an act of Congress. The findings of the inquiry will be published on Wednesday.
“Donald Trump has raised hundreds of millions of dollars by lying to his online donors,” he said Zoe Lofgrenmember of the commission of inquiry into the assault on Congress on January 6, 2021. “In particular – he added – the commission has learned that part of the funds have been used to pay the lawyers” of the former president of the United States.
“In painstaking detail this work documents the sinister plot to overthrow Congress, shred the Constitution, and halt the peaceful transition of power,” the House Speaker said, Nancy Pelosicommenting on the decision. “This commission – added Pelosi – has reached important conclusions regarding the evidence it has collected, and I respect these conclusions”.
“The president has always been very clear. Our democracy continues to be and remains under threat, and we will do our part to protect it,” the White House spokeswoman said. Karine Jean-Pierre.
The next developments
What will happen now? All investigative work and records of the more than one thousand testimonies will be sent to the department for final analysis, but it is not obvious that Trump and the other suspects can actually be indicted. In the eighteen months that the commission has been dealing with the case, the president of the United States Joe Biden he always kept away, avoiding comments.
The ‘special counsel’, the special adviser or super attorney Jack Smith, appointed by the Justice Department to bring together all the investigations involving Trump, could consider an indictment, but it is not a mandatory stop. In addition, the Republicans have already announced that from January, when the new Chamber will meet in which the majority has passed to the conservatives, they will launch an investigation to “discredit” the members of the commission.
The Democrat Adam Schiff he believes the findings do not “carry legal weight” but said he hoped the department would “take the evidence seriously”. “I think – she explained – that the day we begin to accept the illegal behavior of presidents or former presidents or people of power that will be the beginning of the end of our democracy”.
The commission placed the “obstruction of the activity of Congress” at the center of its accusatory castle, a crime hypothesis also cited by the Justice Department itself to justify the decision to seize the cell phone of Jeffrey Clark, a former department official involved in the investigation. This is the same offense prosecutors used to prosecute the nearly 300 people who participated in the assault on Congress, and it could be one the Justice Department will follow up on in the coming weeks.