Donald Trump and his Republican allies have called for the prosecution of members of a congressional committee that put him at the center of the attack on the Capitol, and his failed campaign to overturn 2020 election results.
At least three of those committee members have joined a growing chorus of Democratic officials urging President Joe Biden to end his re-election campaign with a warning that his Republican rival poses a “grave” threat, if elected.
Congressman Adam Schiff warned in a statement this week that a “second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the President can defeat Donald Trump in November.”
In a recent four-page letter to Biden, congressman Jamie Raskin told the president that “everything we believe in is on the line in the next four-and-a-half months” and that “we have an overriding obligation to defeat the forces of resurgent monarchy and oppression.”
“Everything else pales in comparison to this struggle,” he added.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren said in a statement this week that, as a member of the January 6 committee, she knows “perhaps as well as anyone, how unsuitable Donald Trump is to be president.”
“His policies are wrong. His character is unprincipled and corrupt. He remains as grave a threat to the Constitutional order and rule of law that he was on January 6, 2021 when he incited insurrection,” she wrote. “And, if he is elected President again, he will dismantle all that Democrats have achieved for the American people.”
“I think from the data it’s pretty clear,” she told MSNBC on July 19, “that the president is on a trajectory to not prevailing in the election, and I think it’s telling that members of the January 6 committee — myself, Adam Schiff, Jamie Raskin — have all suggested that he step aside, and that we get another candidate who can beat Donald Trump.”
The former president “is a threat to America and the world. He cannot be elected. He must not be elected,” she added. “This is [Biden’s] decision. But it’s not about him, it’s not about me. It’s about America.”
Raskin told The Independent that he wrote the letter, dated July 9, on the Fourth of July weekend.
“My point was that we needed a strategic internal discussion about how to move forward to decisively win the election, which is of immeasurable importance to the future of America,” he said in a statement to The Independent. “The letter expressed my profound affection for the president, my great concern for the future of the country and my confidence in the judgment he would make. None of those things has changed.”
A months-long House select committee investigation into the events surrounding and leading up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6 included a series of blockbuster public hearings laying out evidence and witness testimony that described Trump’s attempts to remain in office at whatever cost.
The panel’s final 845-page report provides a detailed account of Trump’s refusal to cede power — regardless of the outcome — while he privately acknowledged that he lost, even as the ongoing false narrative that the election was “stolen” from him was fueling the mob in the halls of Congress.
The committee unanimously determined that Trump should be criminally charged for conspiracy and obstruction as well as inciting an insurrection. Independent Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is separately prosecuting the former president for conspiracy and obstruction in a case that now faces roadblocks under the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential “immunity” for actions in office.
The committee also led to the criminal prosecutions — and imprisonments — of Trump aides Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, the first members of Trump’s inner circle to face criminal convictions for any crimes connected to Trump’s attempts to reverse his election loss.
Both men were found in contempt of Congress after refusing subpoenas for their testimony to the committee.
Last month, on his Truth Social, Trump called their convictions a “Total and Complete American Tragedy.”
“INDICT THE UNSELECT J6 COMMITTEE,” he demanded.
Trump and Republican officials have accused members of deleting evidence in the investigation, all of which is publicly available.
“It has to stop, because, otherwise, we’re not going to have a country,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News last month. “Look, when this election is over, based on what they have done, I would have every right to go after them.”
Bannon began his four-month prison sentence on July 1.
Navarro ended his four-month sentence in a federal prison facility in Miami on July 17, and then hours later he stepped on the stage of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to a hero’s welcome.
“If they can come for me, and if they can come for Donald Trump,” Navarro said, “be careful. They will come for you.”