Adam Kinzinger Pushes Criminal Prosecution Of Trump Over Jan. 6

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Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot seem only more intent on seeing accountability for former President Donald Trump as time goes on.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one such member, pushed on Twitter this week for the Justice Department to pursue the ex-president. “The Department of Justice of course needs to make sure if they Indict Trump they have the evidence and can win,” Kinzinger said. “BUT… if DOJ doesn’t prosecute, that is an even worse precedent for this nation. NO ONE is above the law. Even Mr. Trump.” At this point, it’s unclear whether the Justice Department is investigating Trump on a personal level, although they’re certainly looking into a whole host of people around him. Just this week, the news emerged that two Republican state Senators out in Arizona, including the state Senate President, Karen Fann, had been subpoenaed in apparent connection to federal investigations into efforts after the 2020 election to secure another term for Trump, despite his well-documented election loss.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), another member of the January 6 committee, has also recently pushed for Justice Department action against Trump. Schiff urged authorities to investigate: “I have yet to see any indication that the former president himself is under investigation,” Schiff said on NBC late last month, discussing investigations specifically at the federal level. “And I concur with what Judge Carter out in California said, that there is sufficient evidence to believe the former president violated multiple federal laws… You can’t say there’s a different standard, a different rule of law for former presidents — particularly when you took the position while they were in office that they couldn’t be indicted.”

The riot panel itself has outlined a variety of potential criminal acts of which Trump could be guilty or in which Trump could be implicated, from financial fraud related to his post-election fundraising operation that lied to supporters about where their money would be going and was based on lies about the election to obstruction of an official proceeding for his targeting of the joint Congressional session for the certification of the presidential election outcome. Trump, meanwhile, is actually under investigation at the local level in Fulton County, Georgia, where District Attorney Fani Willis is conducting a criminal probe of attempts by the former president to undercut Biden’s Georgia win. One focus of the Willis investigation is an infamous phone conversation Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who Trump unsuccessfully pressured to “find” enough votes to flip the state. That many votes didn’t actually exist.

Raffensperger is among the witnesses who’ve publicly testified to the House riot committee. Among other points, Raffensperger explained — in public — how his team actually conducted rigorous examinations of the 2020 electoral process in Georgia (contrary to right-wing insinuations) and found no evidence of systematic election fraud. “The numbers are the numbers, and the numbers don’t lie,” Raffensperger explained. “We had many allegations, and we investigated every single one of them. In fact, I challenged my team, ‘Did we miss anything?’… Every single allegation we checked; we ran down the rabbit trail to make sure that our numbers were accurate.” Such allegations, Raffensperger outlined, included claims of voters who were underage and who were not actually registered to vote.