The January 6 committee’s important case against Donald Trump

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OPINIONS AND COMMENTS

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Then-President Donald Trump attended a campaign rally at Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek, Mich., in 2019, a few days before Christmas. Evan Vucci AP file

The January 6 committee report and this week’s criminal referral heighten the sense that most of Donald Trump’s monumental fabrications are finally coming crashing down around him. But the incongruous development period during development gives some resonance to one of his countless little lies: the one about people saying Merry Christmas again.

That’s not to suggest that it was any gift to elect a president who ransacked our system with all the abandon of a toddler tearing up his presents on Christmas morning. But for those who still share my sentimental attachment to the rule of law, finally holding Trump accountable offers hope, to paraphrase another Trumpism, of taking our country back.

For all his appeals to holiday hegemony, Trump has given us some very unmerry Christmastime moments. It was just days before Christmas in 2020 when he issued his infamous invitation to Washington on Jan. 6, which puts a lump of coup in our collective socks. The following Christmas, some of the halfwits who responded to his call were given judicial dispensation to go home for the holidays, one of several disturbing signs of national non-seriousness about the tragic events of just a year earlier. past.

The Jan. 6 committee fixed that, for which we can thank an odd pair of Californians: outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who formed the panel; and his future successor, Kevin McCarthy, who helped make it necessary by rejecting a bipartisan commission on the attacks. McCarthy also made the grave mistake of dismissing fellow Rep. Liz Cheney from the Republican leadership, setting her service as one of the committee’s most effective members.

Despite previous heated discussion within the panel to the effect that it might not issue a criminal referral against Trump the Beltway is tantamount to allowing rioters to spend Christmas with their families, the committee ultimately made the right decision.

Its referral formally recommends that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against the former president as well as, to some extent, alleged co-conspirators such as California attorney and coup memo author John Eastman. The proposed counts include obstruction of an official proceeding, namely Congressional certification of the election of Joe Biden; and inciting an uprising by falsely denying the Trumps’ loss and encouraging a deadly attack on the Capitol.

Bipartisan committees that overwhelmingly supported the referral quickly refuted any suggestion that such a move would make any difference. Yes, as a matter of law, criminal charges are at the discretion of the Justice Department, which is free to ignore referrals and often does. But the unprecedented congressional recommendation of criminal charges against a former president, especially following such an elaborate and compelling case against him, makes it a failure to hold Trump accountable for his actions. attack on the country more unimaginable.

The prospect of criminal prosecution for the coup attempt is the most important but far from the only form of eventual accountability facing the former president. It turns out he was caught committing another federal crime by stealing classified government documents and storing them in his gaudy compound in Florida. The committee’s Jan. 6 report could bolster the case for state charges that he tried to bully Georgia’s top election official into overturning Biden’s victory there. And earlier this month in New York, his dodgy family business was found guilty of tax fraud.

Not coincidentally, Trumps candidates and party have fallen short of expectations in recent months in the midterm elections, racking up losses that seem to have undermined his GOP support in ways that his lack of legislation, sadly, has no.

Trump’s defeat may be more effective in keeping him in power than any number of lawsuits or convictions. This does not diminish the importance of holding him accountable for the crimes he committed. We will not succeed as a nation of laws if we do not bother to enforce the most heinous and heinous violations of them.

Trumps Merry Christmas nonsense, sometimes couched as a defense of Christian values ​​that are nowhere to be found in his behavior, is really just another way of promoting the idea that this country should continue to privilege certain creed, type and color than others even through failure. to ask everyone to follow the same rules. Our willingness to prosecute even a president who violates our laws is a powerful and necessary way to refute that poisonous idea.

Related stories from the Sacramento Bee

Josh Gohlke is Deputy California Opinion Editor for McClatchy and The Sacramento Bee. He is a former deputy opinion editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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