A criminal referral from the Jan. 6 committee is likely to garner big headlines and turn up the public pressure — particularly from Democrats in a congressional election year — on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s department to aggressively pursue charges.
This year, the committee argued in a legal filing over whether it should be able to access emails from John Eastman, Trump’s attorney, that the former president broke multiple laws. In response, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued an opinion that argued that the former president “more likely than not” committed crimes to stay in power.
“So, in some sense, we’ve already done it,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), referring in an interview to the court filing as being vaguely representative of a criminal referral. “But the question is whether there might be some more emphatic way of going to the Department of Justice with it, or is there some more specific way of bringing the attention to the Department of Justice, or is that unnecessary at this point?”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who has previously suggested that a criminal referral from the committee would be unproductive since it carries no legal weight, said in an interview in March that she was certain the Justice Department had read Carter’s opinion.
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