Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, raised the alarm after a top prosecutor in Robert Mueller‘s special counsel investigation criticized the Justice Department inquiry into the Capitol riot.
One day after Andrew Weissmann, who was known as Mueller’s “pitbull,” appeared on MSNBC and said he has heard from people in the Justice Department following his essay urging prosecutors to “rethink” their “bottom-up approach,” the California Democrat appeared on the same show, warning any hesitation to go after former President Donald Trump based on political calculations is a “dangerous” route to take.
“It is unprecedented for Congress to be so far out ahead of the Justice Department in a complex investigation,” Schiff told host Ari Melber on Wednesday.
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After noting that the Justice Department has “potent tools” and ways to enforce subpoenas in a way Congress cannot, Schiff added: “The idea that a year and half after these events they would not have talked to these witnesses — even the Fulton County district attorney is way ahead of them — I think is cause for great concern.”
The Justice Department has levied hundreds of charges against people accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, and recent activities, including issuing subpoenas in several states, indicate an expanded focus on efforts to use invalid alternate electors to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. The Justice Department inquiry is operating alongside investigations by the Jan. 6 committee and a top prosecutor in Georgia looking into efforts to overturn the election results in that state, all of which Trump has dismissed as being political witch hunts against him.
In his op-ed published in the New York Times on Monday, Weissmann wrote that the House Jan. 6 committee hearings have shown “evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one ‘spoke’ of a grander scheme.”
These hearings “should inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach,” he argued. “A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people ‘at any level’ criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised.” He was referring to a vow the attorney general made back in January.
Just last month, Schiff said he had seen a “greater sense of urgency” from the Justice Department than he previously witnessed with regard to the Jan. 6 matter, though he noted, “I have yet to see any indication that the former president himself is under investigation.” The congressman also said he agreed with the judge who in March declared that Trump “likely” committed crimes related to the 2020 election, noting he concurs with the view that there is “sufficient evidence to believe the former president violated multiple federal laws,” even as he acknowledged it is a “very difficult decision” for the attorney general to decide whether to prosecute. “It’s not a difficult decision to investigate when there’s evidence before you,” Schiff added.
Now, Schiff is making it clear that in his view, the evidence is there. After he described some instances during the Trump administration in which actions were taken that were seen as political, Schiff indicated that the impetus to act clashes with “a desire at the Justice Department to restore the independence of the department to avoid controversy.”
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“While I appreciate all that, I think that if they take that too far — that is, the desire to avoid controversy — and they somehow in practical effect immunized the former president because it is controversial to investigate a former president, that’s a political decision and, I think, a very dangerous one,” Schiff said on Wednesday.
“If the AG is going to follow the evidence where it leads, then — we’ve already seen evidence leading to the former president,” he added, stressing his belief that prosecutors should not “simply wait” to “exhaust all the investigation of those that attacked the Capitol that day, when there were multiple lines of effort to overturn the election.”
