Explainer: what crimes has Trump been accused of by the January 6 committee?

The final meeting of the January 6 committee, which has been investigating the siege attack on the US Capitol in 2021, was gavelled out on Tuesday morning.

It delivered what most people expected, given where the evidence presented over the previous nine public hearings had led: namely to it issuing four criminal referrals to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) against Donald Trump, as well as collectively against Trump, legal academic John Eastman, and others central to conspiracy to delay or impede the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

The committee has asserted its investigation has mustered adequate evidence for the DOJ to lay charges. But what are the crimes identified, and against whom?

The crimes

Obstruction of an Official Proceeding — Trump

Section 1512(c)(2) of Title 18 of the United States Code makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct, influence or impede any official proceeding — say, Congress’ certification of the results of the presidential election — or to corruptly attempt to get in the way of that official process.

It’s no surprise the committee led with this charge against the former president, given the overwhelming amount of evidence it amassed that Trump, who the committee claims:

1. Intended to prevent or delay Congress from certifying the election through his fake electors’ scheme, by pressuring election officials in Georgia and other states to alter their vote tallies, by pressuring the Justice Department to falsely claim the election results were suspect, and by sending an armed and angry mob of his supporters to the Capitol to add to the pressure he was putting on the vice-president to reject lawful electoral votes;
2. That he did all these things “corruptly” because he knew, or should have known, that there was no evidence of fraud that would have altered the outcome and that the vice-president had no unliteral authority to decide who won the election.

Conspiracy to Defraud the United States — Trump, Eastman and others

Trump conspired with a range of people to stop US President Joe Biden’s win from being certified by Congress, the committee alleges. This included Eastman, the architect of the bankrupt legal theory that then vice-president Mike Pence could unilaterally decide who became the next president.

This also includes Jeffrey Clark, a relatively junior environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who, in exchange for promotion to the top job of attorney-general, agreed to do what former attorney-general Bill Barr and other senior DOJ officials would not: send a letter to state legislators in Republican-controlled states falsely claiming that the election results were suspicious and that they had grounds to replace electors for Biden with ones for Trump.

Conspiracy to Make a False Statement — Trump, Eastman and others

The committee uncovered evidence suggesting that Trump, while president, conspired with others to submit slates of fake electors to Congress and the National Archives. Given the DOJ has been investigating this for a while, it remains to be seen whether anything the committee unearthed will be news to department prosecutors.

Incite, Assist or Provide Aid and Comfort to an Insurrection — Trump

This is the big kahuna, not just because insurrection is so rarely charged, but because it could deliver what Congress’ refusal to impeach and convict the president mere weeks after the assault on its own co-equal branch of government did not: the barring of Trump from holding any official position of responsibility again.

This is what the deputy chair of the committee, Republican Liz Cheney, so clearly wants:

At the heart of our republic is the guarantee of the peaceful transfer of power … Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority except one … No man who would behave that way … can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again. He is unfit for any office.

The upshot

The committee’s last public meeting was not about presenting new findings, though there were some titbits of note from former Trump aides. In particular, former White House communications director Hope Hick’s useful but utterly depressing confirmation of previous evidence that the main driver for the coup was nothing loftier than Trump’s bruised ego.

“Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose,” he reportedly told Hicks when she worried about how the coverage of the violence at the Capitol would impact Trump’s legacy. “The only thing that matters is winning.”

Rather, the point was for the committee to tell us what all the evidence it had accumulated meant, which came down to this: the ex-president’s failures were not just moral, but also criminal. And that unless the only arm of government empowered to do so — the Department of Justice — holds Trump accountable for his crimes, then January 6 2021 becomes a dress rehearsal for a coup that a reelected Trump, or a more savvy successor, will certainly try again.