Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said on Sunday they have uncovered enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider an unprecedented criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, The Associated Press reported.
The committee announced that Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is among the witnesses scheduled to testify at a hearing Monday. Stepien was subpoenaed for his public testimony.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on ABC’s “This Week” that he would like the department to “investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump.” Schiff, who also leads the House Intelligence Committee, said that “there are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election that I don’t see evidence the Justice Department is investigating.”
The committee held its first public hearing last week, with members laying out their case against Trump to show how he relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged election despite multiple advisers telling him otherwise and how he intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Additional evidence is set to be released in hearings this week that will demonstrate how Trump and some of his advisers engaged in a “massive effort” to spread misinformation, pressured the Justice Department to embrace his false claims, and urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject state electors and block the vote certification on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the AP report.
Lawmakers indicated that perhaps their most important audience member over the course of the hearings may be Attorney General Merrick Garland, who must decide whether his department can and should prosecute Trump.
“Once the evidence is accumulated by the Justice Department, it needs to make a decision about whether it can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt the president’s guilt or anyone else’s,” Schiff said. “But they need to be investigated if there’s credible evidence, which I think there is.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told CNN’s “State of the Union" that he doesn’t intend to “browbeat” Garland but noted the committee has already laid out in legal pleadings criminal statutes they believe Trump violated.
“I think that he knows, his staff knows, the US attorneys know, what’s at stake here,” Raskin said. “They know the importance of it, but I think they are rightfully paying close attention to precedent in history as well, as the facts of this case.”
Monday's witness list also includes BJay Pak, the top federal prosecutor in Atlanta who left his position on January 4, 2021, a day after an audio recording was made public in which Trump called him a “never-Trumper," and Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor for Fox News.
Thursday’s hearing included a video deposition by Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who said she accepted then-Attorney General Bill Barr's statement that the Justice Department found no fraud sufficient to overturn the election.
The former President responded to his daughter’s comments on Friday and said, "Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)."