A Harvard law professor whose list of former students includes President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, has predicted that the Justice Department will try to indict Donald Trump on criminal charges related to the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
Lawrence Tribe made the prediction on CNN Saturday, speaking with host Wolf Blitzer, who asked the professor point-blank if he thought the DOJ was headed in that direction.
“Merrick Garland is a friend and former student of mine. He’s an honest man, he’s serious, he said he would go to the top if the evidence pointed to it, and it certainly does now,” Mr. Trib said on CNN.
That prediction, while confident in its own right, helps illustrate the overall atmosphere of uncertainty in the legal and political world around whether or not Mr. Trump will actually face any consequences on January 6. That’s a big departure from what lawmakers on Capitol Hill said, including those on the Jan. 6 committee like Adam Schiff; Mr. Schiff publicly fretted a week ago that he saw “no indication” that the Justice Department was pursuing Mr. Trump at all.
Meanwhile, the agency charged hundreds of participants in the attack on Congress with various low-level crimes and sought varying degrees of punishment; a handful of far-right activists, including the leader of the Proud Boys, were hit with more serious charges, including seditious conspiracy.
Over the past few weeks, the Jan. 6 panel has laid out a case in which Mr. Trump could be charged with crimes such as sedition, as members proved that the White House was well aware of the possibility of an outbreak of mass violence on Jan. 6 and they continued their efforts to cancel the election anyway. They also showed how Mr Trump’s closest advisers, including family members such as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, were opposed to the idea and did not support the fraud claims pushed by the president, whose attorney general told him they were nonsense.
But the commission does not have the power to bring criminal charges and must therefore rely on the Justice Department and its typical refusal to publicly or privately confirm major developments in investigations before they happen.
One criminal investigation that is definitely ongoing and could soon turn into an indictment is the effort by prosecutors in Georgia, who have convened a grand jury to hear arguments that Mr. Trump exerted undue pressure on government officials in his efforts to reverse his defeat by Joe Biden in that state.
The Jan. 6 committee held a surprise hearing last week that included explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and is expected to hold at least one more public hearing in the coming weeks.
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