Jan. 6 panel appears to lay out road map for prosecuting Trump

He had means, motive and opportunity. But did Donald Trump commit a crime?

A House committee explicitly declared that he did by conspiring to overturn an election. The attorney general, however, has not weighed in. And a jury of his peers may never hear the case.

The first prime-time hearing into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol this past week confronted the fundamental question that has haunted Trump, the 45th president, ever since he left office: Should he be prosecuted in a criminal court for his relentless efforts to defy the will of the voters and hang on to power?

For two hours Thursday night, the House committee investigating the Capitol attack detailed what it called Trump’s “illegal” and “unconstitutional” seven-part plan to prevent the transfer of power. The panel invoked the Justice Department, citing charges of seditious conspiracy filed against some of the attackers, and seemed to be laying out a road map for Attorney General Merrick Garland to their central target.

Several former prosecutors and veteran lawyers said afterward that the hearing offered the makings of a credible criminal case for conspiracy to commit fraud or obstruction of the work of Congress.

In presenting her summary of the evidence, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the committee’s vice chair, demonstrated that Trump was told repeatedly by his own advisers that he had lost the election yet repeatedly lied to the country by claiming it had been stolen. He pressured state and federal officials, members of Congress and even his own vice president to disregard vote tallies in key states. And he encouraged the mob led by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys while making no serious effort to stop the attack once it began.

“I think the committee, especially Liz Cheney, outlined a powerful criminal case against the former president,” said Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama.

“A crime requires two things — a bad act and criminal intent,” Katyal said. By citing testimony by Trump’s own attorney general, a lawyer for his campaign and others who told him that he had lost, and then documenting his failure to act once supporters stormed the Capitol, Katyal said, the panel addressed both of those requirements.

A congressional hearing, however, is not a court of law, and because there was no one there to defend Trump, witnesses were not cross-examined and evidence was not tested. The committee offered just a selection of the more than 1,000 interviews it has conducted and the more than 140,000 documents it has collected. But it remains to be seen what contrary or mitigating information may be contained in the vast research it has not released yet.

Trump’s allies have dismissed the hearings as a partisan effort to damage him before the 2024 election when he may run for president again. And legal defenders argued that the facts presented by the panel did not support the conclusions that it drew.