The House committee investigating the January 6th riot filed court papers in California on Wednesday night claiming they’ve collected ample evidence to prove that former President Donald Trump and his allies conspired to defraud the American people and obstruct an official proceeding of Congress. They also assert that Trump knew his relentless lies about election fraud were untrue, which could be tantamount to common law fraud.
The filing was part of the legal effort to collect documents from conservative lawyer John Eastman, who helped Trump plot the overthrow of the 2020 election and is now claiming attorney-client privilege.
“Evidence and information available to the Committee establishes a good-faith belief that Mr. Trump and others may have engaged in criminal and/or fraudulent acts, and that [Eastman’s] legal assistance was used in furtherance of those activities,” reads the 61-page document from the House committee’s lawyers, who have asked a California judge to privately review the evidence they collected and determine if Eastman’s privilege claim is invalid. (Lawyers can’t invoke attorney-client privilege in the service of a crime.)
The New York Times adds:
The filing laid out a sweeping if by now well-established account of the plot to overturn the election, which included false claims of election fraud, plans to put forward pro-Trump “alternate” electors, pressure various federal agencies to find irregularities and ultimately push Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to exploit the Electoral Count Act to keep a losing president in power.
“As the president and his associates propagated dangerous misinformation to the public,” the filing said, Mr. Eastman “was a leader in a related effort to persuade state officials to alter their election results based on these same fraudulent claims.”
“The facts we’ve gathered strongly suggest that Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), and vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said in a statement.
The House does not have the authority to file criminal charges, but information gathered via their sprawling investigation can be used by the Department of Justice in a criminal complaint against the former president and his allies. If the DOJ uses the “rebellion or insurrection statue” to charge Trump, he could be barred from holding public office.
Since leaving the presidency, Trump has had to navigate a minefield of legal challenges. Prosecutors in Westchester, Georgia, and New York City are probing his affairs and he faces myriad civil lawsuits connected to the January 6th Capitol attack.
Below are some of the most noteworthy reactions that help contextualize Wednesday’s filing: