By Sarah N. Lynch
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House panel investigating the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol will present evidence this week that former President Donald Trump was involved in a failed bit to submit slates of fake electors to overturn the 2020 election, a key lawmaker said on Sunday.
“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the House of Representatives Select Committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We will also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme, and we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden,” he said.
Schiff’s comments came as the Democratically-led committee prepares to hold its fourth public hearing on Tuesday on their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and Trump’s role in trying to block Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.
Evidence against Trump could potentially be crucial in an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the alleged fake elector plot.
In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed the department had received referrals about slates of alternative fake electors that were sent to the National Archives, and said prosecutors were reviewing them.
In March, the non-profit watchdog group American Oversight published copies https://www.americanoversight.org/american-oversight-obtains-seven-phony-certificates-of-pro-trump-electors of the phony electoral slates, which had been assembled by groups of Trump supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Since then, the DOJ has convened a grand jury to subpoena witnesses and documents as part of the probe, multiple media outlets have reported.
Last week, the DOJ renewed a demand that the House Select Committee turn over transcripts of its interviews with witnesses, saying in a letter those transcripts could be relevant to ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions.
The committee’s failure to turn them over “complicates the department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct,” the letter said.
Asked about the letter on Sunday, Schiff said that usually the two separate branches of government don’t allow one another to “rifle through” each others’ files.
However, he added: “When the Justice Department asks for things specifically… We work with them, and we will work with them here.”
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Heather Timmons and Daniel Wallis)
