When the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack subpoenaed Steve Bannon, he refused to cooperate. This set in motion a series of events: The House voted to hold the Republican operative in contempt, referring the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
About four months ago, federal law enforcement took the matter seriously: On Nov. 12, a federal grand jury indicted Bannon, charging him with contempt of Congress and refusing to produce documents, despite a congressional subpoena.
Since then, the Justice Department has done, well, not a whole lot, at least with regard to the Jan. 6 investigation.
In December, for example, the House also voted to hold former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt for also having ignored a congressional subpoena, but prosecutors have not yet charged the Republican.
As NBC News reported overnight, the bipartisan panel is moving forward with related efforts, hoping the Justice Department will eventually catch up.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol advanced a measure Monday to refer former Trump aides Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress charges. The committee voted 9-0 to send the recommendation to the House…. The panel’s vote paves the way for the House to vote on whether they should each be referred to the Justice Department for a misdemeanor that carries up to a year in prison and fines up to $100,000.
As part of last night’s proceedings, members made little effort to hide their frustrations with federal prosecutors. Reporting on last night’s committee actions, Politico noted that lawmakers “repeatedly urged the Justice Department to take more-aggressive action.”
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff argued last night, “The Department of Justice has a duty to act on this referral and others that we have sent. Without enforcement of congressional subpoenas, there is no oversight, and without oversight, no accountability — for the former president, or any other president, past, present, or future. Without enforcement of its lawful process, Congress ceases to be a co-equal branch of government.”
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria added, “Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours.”
The timing of the rhetoric was of particular interest: Just hours before the committee convened, a federal judge released a ruling that said Donald Trump “likely attempted to obstruct the joint session of Congress” on Jan. 6, which would be a crime.
Judge David Carter added, “The illegality of the plan was obvious…. Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”
As we discussed yesterday, this was a civil case, not a criminal case, and the underlying dispute was and is over congressional access to a lawyer’s emails. The judge’s ruling was dramatic, but it wasn’t literally a criminal indictment of the former president.
That said, the decision was a legal and political bombshell. A Washington Post report noted, “[Judge Carter’s] ruling does not mean Trump will be charged with a crime, or even investigated. But the opinion will increase pressure on the Justice Department to intensify its probe of the Jan. 6 riot, and potentially examine the conduct of Trump himself. While Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed to hold accountable those responsible for the violent breach of the Capitol ‘at any level,’ there have been scant signs that the Justice Department is directly investigating Trump’s conduct.” Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman added, “At this point, it’s hard to see how the Justice Department can tenably refrain from a full criminal investigation into whether Trump broke laws in connection with Jan. 6…. [N]ot doing the investigation at all would mean the legal system doesn’t even attempt to answer a fundamental question here — whether Trump’s extraordinarily corrupt effort to subvert our political order amounts to criminality — to the degree that’s obviously warranted.” I’m hard pressed to imagine how any fair-minded observer would disagree. An experienced federal judge looked at the evidence and concluded that the former president, while in office, likely committed crimes. Indeed, the respected jurist described the alleged criminal misdeeds as “obvious.” The case at hand did not provide a vehicle for the judge to do anything about such findings. All Carter could do is shine a light on what he discovered following a thorough review of the evidence. The next steps would need to be taken by the Justice Department, which intends to … well, no one really knows what federal law enforcement intends to do, if anything. But the attorney general and his team were already feeling pressure to investigate, not just the radicalized foot-soldiers who attacked our seat of government, but the leaders responsible for orchestrating a scheme to overturn an American presidential election. As of this morning, that pressure has reached a new level of intensity.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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