Your Evening Briefing: Jan. 6 Panel Calls for Trump Prosecution

The Jan. 6 committee, in a final session announcing the release of its report on the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, recommended Donald Trump be subject to federal prosecution for his actions both before and on that day—in what the panel has called the first attempted coup in America’s 246-year-history. The referral to the US Department of Justice, also a first, is the culmination of a 17-month investigation that was marked by a series of dramatic hearings in which the bipartisan committee laid out its findings in sometimes excruciating detail. The panel voted unanimously on Monday to refer Trump for prosecution on multiple offenses, including insurrection, conviction of which would disqualify the Republican from holding public office. The committee’s referral isn’t binding on the Justice Department, though federal prosecutors have spent much of the past two years investigating Trump and a special counsel now oversees at least two criminal probes of his conduct. That said, the committee’s investigation has at times intersected with that of the DOJ, and the historic nature of the panel’s call to prosecute a former president is unlikely to go unnoticed. Describing the sum of the allegations sketched out in the committee’s findings as a “crime against democracy” and referring to the hundreds of Trump followers already charged and convicted, Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin said the US isn’t a country where “foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.”

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried had indicated he was prepared to be extradited to the US from the Bahamas as soon as Monday, but apparently he caught his lawyer off guard.