In the final public hearing on Thursday before the midterm elections, the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection made its strongest case yet, with the committee’s Republican vice chair saying that the majority of evidence collected shows the central cause of the deadly riot was one man — former President Donald Trump.
The committee provided new testimony and never-before-seen footage showing that Trump and his allies planned to declare victory on Election Day in 2020, long before the votes were counted.
Commenting on the latest from the committee, John Farmer Jr., former New Jersey state attorney general and director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, said, ‘They already have enough, even before today, to charge him, to make out federal cases if they want to do it. It’s going to be a question of the discretion of the attorney general and his weighing what the best course of action for the country will be.”
“I think where they are struggling a little bit is on the issue of seditious conspiracy, because then you require a real intent to incite rebellion and to overthrow the government,” Farmer said. “President Trump could have the defense of basically ‘I was listening to Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers who were telling me that this was a proper course of action. And advice of counsel is a potentially viable defense. So that’s why there’s so much emphasis today on what exactly the president knew, did he acknowledge that he lost…”
