During its final meeting before it is disbanded on January 3, the House “Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” unloaded on Donald Trump, along with four House Republicans: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
The committee unanimously referred the four House members to the House Ethics Committee for defying subpoenas issued by the committee.
For Donald Trump, the committee upped the ante further, charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States; obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to make a false statement; and inciting, assisting, or aiding in and comforting an insurrection against the country.
The committee asked the Department of Justice to prosecute the former president.
If convicted on the fourth charge, Trump would be banned from running for public office.
Jordan’s spokesman called out the committee:
This is just another partisan and political stunt made by a Select Committee that knowingly altered evidence, blocked minority representation on a committee for the first time in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives, and failed to respond to Mr. Jordan’s numerous letters and concerns.
Perry’s spokesman called the committee “petulant”:
More games from a petulant and soon-to-be defunct kangaroo court desperate for revenge and struggling to get out from under the weight of its own irrelevancy.
Biggs himself unloaded on the committee:
This referral is their final political stunt. It’s inappropriate to use the House Ethics Committee — a committee with more pressing matters to attend to — to help reach the J6 Committee’s pre-determined conclusions.
And then Biggs made a promise:
The J6 Committee has defamed my name and my character, and I look forward to reviewing their documents, publishing their lies, and setting the record straight in the 118th Congress.
Trump used his Truth Social account to accuse the committee of doing everything they could to keep him from running for president again:
The people [of the United States] understand that the Democratic Bureau of Investigation, the DBI, are out to keep me from running for president because they know I’ll win and that this whole business of prosecuting me is just like impeachment was — a partisan attempt to sideline me and the Republican Party.
He added:
The Fake charges made by the highly partisan Unselect Committee of January 6th have already been submitted, prosecuted, and tried in the form of Impeachment Hoax # 2.
That “hoax” died in the Senate on February 13, 2021, when 43 senators voted “not guilty,” resulting in Trump’s acquittal.
Noted legal and constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz weighed in on the irrelevance of the committee’s final report, calling the 154-page regurgitation and summary following thousands of pages of reports, hundreds of interviews, and the expenditure of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds “a worthless piece of paper.”
He told Newsmax:
Congress has no power to recommend a prosecution….
The Justice Department [should] say [to] Congress: Look. We process. We investigate. Don’t tell us who to investigate and who to prosecute.
You had a kangaroo hearing. One-sided.
You didn’t allow a cross-examination. You didn’t allow any adverse witnesses, so don’t expect us to take seriously any [of your] recommendations.
You made a bad prosecution, so the American public should make no conclusions based on this one-sided recommendation and it should ignore it as well.
What the Department of Justice, headed as it is by far-left Attorney General Merrick Garland, is likely to do instead, is ignore Dershowitz, ignore the rules, ignore the Constitution’s separation of powers, and proceed with the prosecution/persecution of the 45th president of the United States.
Garland will also ignore the will of the people. The results of the latest poll from McLaughlin & Associates, taken last week, reveals that, among Republican voters, 77 percent support Trump for the Republican Party nomination in 2024.
When asked who they would support in a primary battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 58 percent of those same voters would vote for Trump, while just 36 percent would vote for DeSantis.
So, it appears that Trump is right when he commented on Truth Social, “When they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me.”