Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee are asking the Justice Department for immediate arrangements to view the full Jeffrey Epstein case files. In a formal inquiry sent Saturday, the lawmakers said the need for a review of the papers is “urgent”, in part because of a forthcoming public committee hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The committee’s inquiry, a copy of which CBS News obtained Saturday, said the panel has questions about why the Justice Department released only half of the estimated pages of Epstein files.
“Our review is particularly urgent because DOJ itself claims to have identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages, but after releasing only about half of them—including over 200,000 pages that DOJ redacted or withheld—says strangely that it has fully complied with the (law),” the letter said.
The inquiry, signed by the panel’s ranking member and Maryland Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, is addressed to Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche. It reminded Blanche that he previously said that if any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the files “in any unredacted form,” they are welcome to make arrangements to do so.
“The Democratic Members of the House Judiciary Committee do wish to review the files,” the letter said.
The Judiciary Committee Democrats are not the first to ask for access to the full files. In a formal request sent Friday night, Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna asked for “access to unredacted documents of the Jeffrey Epstein files in order to fulfill Congress’s oversight responsibilities and to ensure that survivors receive the transparency and accountability they deserve.” Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Khanna, a California Democrat, sponsored the 2025 legislation that passed Congress and required a full release of Epstein files.
The Congressional inquiries to the Justice Department question whether the Trump administration is withholding documents without justification.
“We seek to ensure that your redactions comply with the Act’s requirement that materials be withheld only in narrow circumstances, such as protecting victims’ personally identifiable information, and not on the basis of ’embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary,’” the Judiciary Committee Democrats’ letter said.
Blanche defended the agency’s document release and redactions at a news conference on Friday.
“When we said that we were not legally allowed to release documents, that’s a fact,” he said. “That was true, it remains true today, and then with the act’s passage, we are now able and directed to release documents, which is what we are doing.”
Groups of Epstein survivors have blasted the Trump administration for its handling of the files, including Friday’s release.
“The Justice Department cannot claim it is finished releasing files until every legally required document is released and every abuser and enabler is fully exposed,” one group, which included Epstein survivors Annie Farmer and Dani Bensky, wrote in a statement Friday.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the Congressional inquiries.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan has long been a critic of former special counsel Jack Smith. On Thursday, Jordan had a chance to question Smith during his congressional testimony. CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett spoke with Jordan about that and more.
Republicans’ takeaways from Smith’s testimony were, at best, tangential to furthering their claims of weaponization. The main one concerned the House select committee on January 6th, which conducted a separate, public investigation. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, was the star witness, testifying in the summer of 2022 that Trump had lunged for the wheel of the Presidential limousine and demanded to be taken to the Capitol. But Smith described Hutchinson as “a second- or even third-hand witness,” and said that her account had been contradicted by someone who was present. “The partisan January 6th Committee’s ENTIRE case was just destroyed by . . . Jack Smith,” Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee posted on X. “Star witness completely unreliable!” A gotcha, perhaps, but of Democrats on the committee, not of Smith, who comes off as a careful prosecutor, mindful of courtroom limits on the use of hearsay.
The conventional wisdom about the criminal cases that were brought against Trump after his first term—four in total—has become that they were politically harmful to Democrats and legally unwise. That seems half right. Certainly, the onslaught of cases against the once and future President contributed to a sense of partisan piling on. But the indictments that Smith’s office secured were the strongest of the lot, and Smith’s testimony illustrated their importance. Others may have second thoughts about the wisdom of pursuing Trump. Not Smith. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today,” he said, “I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s allegation that Biden weaponized the Justice Department grows more surreal by the day. The Republican counsel opened his questioning of Smith by taking him through the elements of Justice Robert Jackson’s famous speech, as Attorney General in 1940, about the tremendous power of the federal prosecutor, to “pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” The counsel asked, “Do you agree with that?,” and you could see where this might be heading—an indignant account of vindictive prosecution.
But it was Trump who ordered the failed indictments of the New York attorney general Letitia James (three tries, no less) and the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and who fired prosecutors who refused to comply with his instructions. Susie Wiles, Trump’s own chief of staff, has acknowledged, “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.” In late December, Attorney General Pam Bondi commented on an active grand-jury investigation into government weaponization during the Biden and Obama Administrations, claiming that there was “a ten-year stain on the country committed by high-ranking officials” and that one of the investigation’s subjects, the former C.I.A. director John Brennan, was among the “bad actors.” This is hardly the Jacksonian vision of prosecutors with “sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship.”
Perhaps the most maddening aspect of the Smith deposition was that he was effectively barred from commenting on the stronger of his cases, the classified-documents prosecution. Smith ended his cases after Trump’s reëlection; later, Smith submitted reports describing them, as required under Justice Department regulations. But, in January of 2025, the Trump-appointed judge overseeing the classified documents case, Aileen Cannon, blocked Smith’s report from becoming public, on the basis that charges were still pending against two co-defendants, the Trump aide Walt Nauta and the Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira. The Trump Administration then moved to drop the cases against them. But Cannon dawdled in ruling on whether the report should be unsealed, leading an appeals court to chide her in November for “undue delay.”
An hour before Smith’s testimony, his attorney Peter Koski said at the deposition, the Justice Department informed Smith by e-mail that Cannon’s order meant he was barred from discussing any information contained in the report. Asked about why Trump refused to return the documents despite repeated requests, and about why he took them in the first place, Smith demurred. “Given the current state of the injunction, I don’t think that’s a question I can answer,” he said. A few days after the deposition, Cannon finally ruled that her order sealing the document would expire in February—at which point she could agree to release the report. Even if Cannon were to allow it, though, the final decision would fall to Bondi. Special-counsel reports have been routinely released, but don’t count on Cannon or Bondi to follow suit. The definitive account of the documents’ case could easily remain hidden from public view.
Smith’s deposition was, in all likelihood, as close as he will get to making a closing argument. It marks, most likely, the unsatisfying conclusion of an unsatisfying episode, one that underscored the limitations of the criminal-justice system in dealing with a lawless President. Now, with Trump calling Smith a “criminal” who should be “investigated and put in prison,” one question is the jeopardy that Smith himself may face. “I am eyes wide open that this President will seek retribution against me if he can,” Smith said at one point in the deposition. Still, he said, of his testimony before the committee, “I came here. I was asked to come here.” ♦
Last month, Alphabet told the House Judiciary Committee that it would allow some creators who were banned from YouTube for spreading COVID-19 and election-related misinformation to come back to the platform. Now, the company is outlining how that process will work, though it’s not clear exactly who will be provided that opportunity,
YouTube says that beginning today it will give “some previously terminated creators” the ability to “request” a fresh channel in an effort the company is characterizing as a bid for “second chances” on the platform. The update doesn’t reference its COVID-19 or election misinformation policies, which had come under fire from House Republicans. Instead, YouTube says that the “pilot program” will be available to some “qualified creators.” It doesn’t explain how it will determine who qualifies. Last month, far-right personalities Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones — both of whom were banned from YouTube years before the pandemic — attempted to rejoin YouTube after the letter was made public and were promptly removed.
“Our goal is to roll this out to creators who are eligible to apply over the coming months, and we appreciate the patience as we ramp up, carefully review requests, and learn as we go,” the company wrote. “Not every type of channel termination will be eligible.” Among the factors YouTube will consider are “whether the creator committed particularly severe or persistent violations of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, or whether the creator’s on- or off-platform activity harmed or may continue to harm the YouTube community.” People banned for copyright infringement won’t be able to apply.
All that is still remarkably vague compared to the language Alphabet used in its letter to the House Judiciary Committee last month. “YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the Company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect,” it said.
Importantly, YouTube isn’t giving previously banned creators access to their old channels and subscribers. Anyone who is let back on under the program will instead have the opportunity to create an entirely new channel, which means they’ll have to rebuild their presence from scratch.
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are launching a review Friday of the ouster of federal prosecutor Erik Siebert, a week after he resigned as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and a day after Siebert’s replacement signed an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. Prosecutors had expressed concern about Siebert’s possible ouster over his failure to bring a case against another Trump adversary, New York Attorney General Letitia James.
President Trump, in a social media post after Siebert’s departure from the office, had pressed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi about prosecutions against political foes including Comey, James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, calling them “guilty as hell.”
Mr. Trump praised one of his own former defense lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, calling her “a really good lawyer,” and told Bondi in the post, “We can’t delay any longer.”
Halligan was sworn in as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on Monday, replacing Siebert in the office. She has no prior experience as a prosecutor.
Lindsey Halligan holds ceremonial proclamations to be signed by President Trump in the Oval Office on March 6, 2025.
Al Drago / Bloomberg/Getty
Three days after Halligan took over the key prosecutorial role, Comey was indicted on two counts — one count of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice, related to Senate testimony he gave almost five years ago. The indictment bears Halligan’s signature alone. Comey denies wrongdoing.
In a letter sent Friday to Bondi, House Judiciary Committee Democrats requested copies of Siebert’s performance evaluations, and they’re seeking records that would show any backchannel communication between the White House and Justice Department officials over the Comey matter.
The letter from the panel’s Democrats requests “all communications between any official or employee at the Justice Department and any official or employee at the White House, including President Trump, regarding prosecution referrals to the Justice Department involving current or former public officials, including but not limited to Letitia James, James Comey, Senator Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, from January 20, 2025, to the present.”
Before she became an interim U.S. attorney, Halligan was a Trump White House aide who was also his defense lawyer.
Committee Democrats are also requesting records about Halligan. Their letter to the Justice Department asks for “All documents regarding the selection and appointment of Lindsey Halligan as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, including her application materials, any vetting documents, any communications about her qualifications, and any promises or commitments she may have made to the White House or the Justice Department regarding prosecuting any specific individuals.”
Because they’re in the minority and lack congressional subpoena authority, Democrats’ requests for documents are not likely to be granted by the Trump administration. But their letter presents them with the opportunity to register their dismay with the administration’s actions.
In the letter to Bondi, House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin wrote, “President Trump — with you as a willing partner — is obliterating centuries of prosecutorial independence and steering the Justice Department into dangerous new territory.”
Mr. Trump had expressed his displeasure with Siebert, saying Friday: “I want him out.”
The president criticized Siebert because he had the support of both of Virginia’s Democratic senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.
A U.S. attorney nominee requires the backing of the two senators who represent the state to advance through the Senate Judiciary Committee. It seems unlikely Kaine and Warner would support Halligan. Both senators told the Washington Post they’d review her nomination, but Kaine said that neither of them has backed a U.S. attorney nominee who lacks prosecutorial or Justice Department experience.
Scott MacFarlane is CBS News’ Justice correspondent. He has covered Washington for two decades, earning 20 Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards. His reporting has resulted directly in the passage of five new laws.
Channels once banned by YouTube for spreading false information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic or the 2020 election may soon have the opportunity to get their channels back, in a decision transparently courting “conservative voices.”
Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, has via counsel to the in which it alleges the company was pressured by the Biden administration to take down misinformation on YouTube related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate the company’s existing policies at the time. It now describes the Biden administration’s actions as “unacceptable and wrong.”
It also informed the committee that YouTube would be offering a path to reinstatement for creators whose channels were banned for repeatedly violating community guidelines on election-integrity-related content, as well as for COVID-19-related content. The guidelines under which those bans were carried out were removed by the company in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Details on exactly what the path for reinstatement looks like were not shared.
“The COVID-19 pandemic was an unprecedented time in which online platforms had to reach decisions about how best to balance freedom of expression with responsibility,” the letter reads. “Senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding user generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.”
Alphabet goes on to denounce any government attempts to “dictate how the Company moderates content,” and says it will always “fight against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.”
Notable YouTube channels banned for either COVID-19 or election-integrity-related content include , Co-Deputy Director of the FBI and the channel for , an organization previously linked with Secretary of HHS RFK Jr. “YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse,” the company wrote. In its letter, Alphabet also expresses concern that the European Union’s could have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
The letter was sent in response to subpoenas as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s ongoing investigations into alleged government-directed content moderation. The committee recently on “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” among others.
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, the longest-serving New Yorker in the House, will not seek reelection in 2026, stating that there’s a “necessity for generational change in the party.”
In an interview published Monday in The New York Times, Nadler said that after watching former President Joe Biden withdraw from the 2024 election following his rough debate against President Trump, he decided a younger successor “can maybe do better, can maybe help us more.”
“I’m not saying we should change over the entire party,” Nadler told The New York Times. “But I think a certain amount of change is very helpful, especially when we face the challenge of Trump and his incipient fascism.”
He did not tell the Times who he would prefer succeed him.
Nadler, 78, was first elected to Congress in 1992. He was chair of the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2023 and then served as ranking member until Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland launched his bid to unseat Nadler. The New York Democrat made the decision to step down in December 2024. Nadler also served as a manager of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.
Nadler was facing a primary challenge from 26-year-old Liam Elkind. Elkind told CBS News in August that the party needs “to be the party of fighters. We need to be the party of organizers. We need to be more generationally relevant, better organized and ready to fight.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a statement called Nadler “a relentless fighter for justice, civil rights and liberties and the fundamental promise of equality for all.”
“As the legendary Chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, he helped lead two historic impeachments and ensure that no one, not even the President, is above the law,” Jeffries said. “In that role, he championed legislation to protect our democracy and the American way of life, fighting for women, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, including enshrining into law the Respect for Marriage Act. … Jerry’s years of leadership have earned him a spot among our nation’s greatest public servants. He will be deeply missed by the House Democratic Caucus next term and we wish him and his family the very best in this new chapter.”
DENVER — On Tuesday afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee was filled with law enforcement — from the smallest of Colorado communities, to the largest cities — sitting alongside people who know what it’s like to be arrested.
All of the people in attendance were there for the first hurdle facing House Bill 24-1372, a bill that aims to define prone restraint as use of force. Proponents said it would increase the accountability of law enforcement in Colorado, while opponents believe there is still a lot of work to be done on the bill.
The bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on an 8-3 vote.
Prone restraint is a physical restraint where an individual is placed facedown.
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State Representative Leslie Herod, D-Denver, is one of the prime sponsors of HB24-1372. She said prone restraint would be considered excessive force when used inappropriately.
“We have introduced a bill that clarifies when prone restraint can be used, and most importantly, when someone must be put in a recovery position, allowing them to breathe and save lives,” Herod said. “This bill clearly defines prone restraint as a use of force, putting it into the accountability section.”
Herod said law enforcement could still use the prone restraint tactic if this bill became law — but only in certain circumstances — thanks to a significant amendment made to the original form of the bill.
Colorado bill would define prone restraint as excessive force if used inappropriately
“Law enforcement does need to use prone restraint to secure a scene for instance. If they are needing to secure a scene or there’s multiple people on scene who need to be secured, they will often do prone commands, telling someone to get down on the ground and put their hands behind their back. That’s fine. That is still permissible in this bill,” Herod explained. “They may even have to use mechanical restraints to put someone in prone. That is also allowable in this bill, but what’s not allowable is to keep someone in that position for too long, facedown, where they cannot breathe. And that can cause the harm.”
One of the supporters of the bill is Shataeah Kelly. Kelly was arrested by Aurora police officers in 2019.
“I called the police for help, and instead they came in and arrested me,” Kelly said.
Aurora
Fired Aurora officer apologizes for not helping ‘inverted’ suspect
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Body-camera video from the arrest shows Kelly being forcefully tied with her hands and legs behind her back. She was put into the backseat of a police cruiser on her stomach. The video shows her in that position for more than 20 minutes. At one point, she slips off the backseat, and her face is pressed against the floor of the car.
“I had no idea where he was taking me. I had no idea where I was going. I couldn’t see anything and I was screaming for help,” Kelly recalled. “I couldn’t get out of a situation. I wasn’t being heard, and I felt like I was left for dead.”
The officer involved in the arrest — former Aurora Police Officer Levi Huffine — was fired in 2020 for “severe misconduct.”
Colorado Springs Police Chief Adrian Vasquez walked into the committee hearing opposed to the bill.
“The original bill really concerned us in the profession,” Vasquez said. “The requirement of the original bill was that the only time you would be allowed to do that is if deadly force was authorized, which meant that you were under the most extreme situations. But really, it’s a tactic that law enforcement uses all the time to safely put people into custody who are being violent, or who may have a weapon on them.”
Vasquez said the amendment helped alleviate some concerns about the bill — but not all of them. He still worries it will be burdensome on organizations across the state, and could hurt hiring and retention.
Another concern, echoed by many in the committee, is that the bill falls under Title 18 — criminal code.
“If it lands in Title 18, it’s going to require that there’s use of force reporting when we were involved in a compliant arrest,” Vasquez explained. “If it falls under Title 18, from a recruiting and retention perspective, it’s going to place this onus or this feeling on officers that they’re now even more scrutinized, and I think it could impact recruiting and retention greatly… We still have the criminal avenue for an officer that really acted egregiously, didn’t follow a policy, didn’t follow training, hurt somebody — those kinds of actions can still be charged criminally.”
While Herod said she is willing to work with opponents on the Title 18 classification, she does not plan on completely removing it from the bill.
HB24-1372 heads to the Appropriations Committee next.
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Special Counsel David Weiss leaves a closed-door meeting with lawmakers surrounding the investigation into Hunter Biden during a break at the O’Neill House Office Building on November 7, 2023, in Washington, DC.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Washington — Special Counsel David Weiss — the man charged with leading the federal probe into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter — told congressional investigators Tuesday that Justice Department officials assured him he would have the necessary authorities to pursue criminal charges against the president’s son in any district he saw necessary, but he ultimately did not seek or receive final authorization, according to a transcript of Weiss’ testimony reviewed by CBS News.
Weiss voluntarily agreed to appear before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee before the submission of his special counsel report — an unusual move during an ongoing investigation— to “address misunderstandings about the scope of my authority” in the Hunter Biden probe.
Throughout his testimony, which occurred behind closed doors and was the product of negotiations between congressional and Justice Department officials, Weiss said he could not answer numerous questions about decisions made over the course of the years-long probe into the president’s son, citing federal norms that prevent prosecutors from speaking about investigations before they are completed.
Congressional investigators from both sides of the aisle, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, focused on whether Weiss was granted special attorney authority under 28 U.S. Code § 515 in the spring of 2022. That authority would have allowed Weiss to pursue criminal charges in a federal district outside of his jurisdiction.
According to the transcript of his testimony, Weiss — a Trump appointee who was kept on the job to continue the Biden probe — told Congress he first raised the possibility of being granted that authority from Justice Department officials in 2022 as he explored bringing charges against Hunter Biden in either Washington, D.C., or California. Those officials did not immediately grant Weiss the authority and instead instructed him to first follow what he described as a conventional process of asking to partner with prosecutors in those districts. If those prosecutors refused him, Weiss said the officials assured him he would then be granted the requested authority.
“Look, if you decide to proceed in D.C., you have the authority to do so, and you have the authority to–under 515, to bring whatever charges you deem appropriate,” Weiss recalled a former Justice Department official telling him in 2022. He was referring to Section 515, the federal statute that authorizes federal prosecutors specially appointed by the attorney general to bring charges in districts other than their own. The special counsel said he later took that to mean he could pursue charges in California, too, if he chose.
The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, and the U.S. attorney for the central district of California, E. Martin Estrada, told lawmakers in closed-door interviews of their own that they declined to partner with Weiss to pursue criminal charges against Hunter Biden, but did offer to provide administrative and logistical support for his investigation in their respective districts. Weiss told lawmakers his investigation was not “blocked” by their offices, although they did not agree to pursue charges with him.
“They never said no. I asked for it. They said, Let’s follow the process. Go talk–let’s talk to Mr. Graves, see if they’re going to join. We’re going to take it step by step. No one ever said no,” Weiss recalled.
“If the decision was made to proceed, I knew I had the authority to do so,” Weiss said of bringing charges in another district.
“You had already asked Matthew Graves to partner, you had asked Martin Estrada to partner, and both had said no. And so, at that point in time, it’s hard for us to understand, as we sit here today, how didn’t it prove necessary? I mean, this is before you were afforded, you know, Special Counsel status in August of 2023. You write, you know, ‘if it proved necessary,’” asked congressional investigators.
“The question speaks to deliberations…charging decisions,” the special counsel responded in part, according to the transcript. “Those are things I just can’t get into.”
Weiss stressed throughout his interview that he was not “denied” the charging authority, but rather did not officially seek to file the charges that would have required the approval, according to the transcript.
“I had the authority, but still, I had to proceed consistent with departmental processes,” Weiss said at one point. “Nobody blocked me. Nobody prevented me. I still had the authority, and I had the ability to make the decision.”
“It wasn’t a question of my authority. It was just a question of deciding to move forward,” he answered when he was asked about his communications with officials in California.
What remained unclear from his testimony were the reasons behind his initial decisions not to pursue charges in the other districts and why – over a year later – Weiss ultimately decided he needed to be elevated to special counsel to continue his investigation into the president’s son.
“I’m not going to discuss that. That’s a matter — those are privileged communications between myself and the executives at the Department,” he said. Weiss asked for and was granted special counsel status by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this year, and he revealed in his testimony that the two have never spoken directly.
Weiss’ testimony comes as Republican-led congressional investigations into Hunter Biden’s finances and business ventures probe whether senior officials, including Weiss, took any steps to obstruct or disrupt criminal investigations into Hunter Biden.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, case agents previously assigned to the Hunter Biden investigation, told lawmakers they recommended federal charges be brought against the president’s son for tax violations but testified that Weiss said he had been denied special counsel status and was “not the deciding person” to bring charges in the case. They alleged intentional slow-walking and “an undeniable pattern of preferential treatment” in the federal investigation.
“There were really earth-shaking statements made by David Weiss,” Shapley said in an exclusive interview with CBS News earlier this year. “And the first one was that he is not the deciding person on whether or not charges are filed,” the whistleblower added. “It was just shocking to me.”
Weiss has repeatedly refuted Shapley’s claims and said he did not request special counsel status until August, when the request was “promptly granted” by Garland.
Responding to Shapely’s contention that Weiss said he was “not the deciding person” on bringing charges against Hunter Biden, the special counsel told congressional investigators, “It’s not what I said, nor is it what I believed, as I’ve told you guys repeatedly today.” He later conceded it was possible his comments were misinterpreted.
Shapley’s notes from an October 2022 meeting with participants from the FBI and IRS also included the contention that Weiss told investigators the Justice Department’s Tax Division was to be part of any charging approval process.
“Under the Justice Manual, DOJ Tax has to approve felony charges, right,” Weiss was asked Tuesday.
He responded, “DOJ Tax has approval — is required to approve Title 26 charges. Yes, we have discussed that. And I welcomed DOJ Tax’s input in this case. Never felt that I had an issue in that regard.”
“I’m not challenging the DOJ Tax. And I believe I would’ve said, as I’ve said here today, I’m not operating in a vacuum. There are processes here. And others need to be involved,” he added later, “DOJ Tax was performing its due diligence. And I welcomed that.”
Earlier in his deposition, Weiss testified he could not recall any situation in which the Tax Division and he were ever at an “impasse” and the division was “comfortable” with him making decisions, although he said officials there likely need to sign off on any future decisions.
The special counsel’s office is still considering bringing tax charges in California against the president’s son and in September, Weiss charged Hunter Biden with three felony gun charges in Delaware. Biden pleaded not guilty and has denied wrongdoing.
The charges followed a breakdown in negotiations between Weiss’ team and Biden’s defense after a plea and diversion agreement abruptly fell apart in July. The special counsel refused to answer questions about the failed plea agreement and the next steps in the probe when pressed by House investigators, according to the transcript.
The former IRS agents also alleged Weiss’ office allowed the statute of limitations to expire on charges related to Hunter Biden’s alleged failure to pay taxes in 2014 and 2015 in Washington, D.C.
The special counsel confirmed the statute of limitations has expired, but did not say more. “But even though the statute of limitations has lapsed and even though charges won’t be filed, if there were to be an outstanding tax prosecution, there is no reason to believe that evidence pertaining to prior years, or witnesses involved in prior years, wouldn’t be part of that litigation,” he said.
Weiss said more information about his team’s decision-making processes would be revealed at the end of his investigation in the form of a report, as federal statute dictates.
His testimony largely mirrored letters Weiss wrote to Congressional investigators over the summer. In a July letter to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Weiss explained that he discussed a possible appointment under Section 515 with federal officials that “would have allowed me to file charges in a district outside my own without the partnership of the local U.S. Attorney.” He said he was “assured” he’d be granted the authority if needed, “months before the October 7, 2022, meeting referenced throughout the whistleblowers’ allegations.”
House Democrats largely dismissed the closed-door testimony as a “farce” and a “complete nothingburger.”
“He (Weiss) stated multiple times that he made all the charging decisions on his own, that no one gave him any instructions or suggestions as to charging decisions,” said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler. “And the Republicans just keep going over and over the same material and getting the same answers.”
Meanwhile, Republican members of the committee said Weiss was unable to answer many of the questions posed to him.
“Mr. Weiss was here incarnate, but not particularly in spirit,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, said.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. The testimony came amid a legal battle over President Biden’s asylum plan and the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Texas for putting up floating barriers to stop migrants. CBS News immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez joined to unpack the legal challenges facing the Biden administration.
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When Special Counsel Jack Smith announced last week that a federal grand jury had indicted former President Donald Trump, he made a point of saying that the government would “seek a speedy trial in this matter, consistent with the public interest.” Whether Trump gets one could determine whether he goes to prison for his alleged crimes.
In just over 18 months, Trump could be serving as president again, at which point he’d be in a position to attempt to pardon himself or instruct the Department of Justice to dismiss its case against him. That might seem like a long way away, but for the nation’s tortoiselike federal-court system, it’s not. Complex, high-profile cases sometimes take years to get to trial, and former federal prosecutors told me that, even under the fastest scenarios, Trump’s trial won’t begin for several months and potentially for more than a year. Trump may well be waiting for a trial when voters cast their presidential ballots next fall. Although Smith will do all he can to hurry up the prosecution, the former president’s legal team could move to dismiss the charges—though that would almost certainly be futile—and file other pretrial motions in order to bog down the process.
“There’s a pretty obvious incentive from [Trump’s] point of view for delaying this,” Kristy Parker, a lawyer at the advocacy group Protect Democracy who tried cases for 15 years at the Justice Department, told me. “That is especially true if he understands that the evidence against him is significant and that the chances of him being convicted of these offenses are pretty high.”
Different federal courts operate at different speeds. The Eastern District of Virginia, for example, has long been known as “the rocket docket”; it’s raced through even high-profile cases such as the 2018 trial of Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort. Trump’s trial will occur in the Southern District of Florida and will reportedly be overseen by one of his own appointees, Judge Aileen Cannon. “Federal judges have enormous control over their courtrooms and over the schedule and timing of their cases,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia and Texas, told me. “Some are very good at docket management, and some are not.” Having served as a judge for less than three years, Cannon hasn’t developed much of a reputation either way.
Cannon presided over a lawsuit Trump filed last year after the FBI executed a search warrant at his Mar-a-Lago estate. She issued a series of rulings favorable to him. Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat and a former federal prosecutor who served as a top counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, told me it was “concerning” that Cannon would apparently run the former president’s trial. “It was pretty clear that her initial rulings did not follow the law but followed some preconceived personal and political viewpoints, and there’s no place for that in the judiciary,” Goldman said. Indeed, the conservative Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a pair of Cannon’s decisions, including one that barred the government from accessing some of the documents that the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago.
Another former Democratic co-counsel during the Trump impeachment, Norm Eisen, has called for Cannon to recuse herself or be taken off the case.
If Cannon stays on the case, she will have fairly wide latitude to set its tempo. She will be responsible for scheduling any pretrial motions and hearings, determining what evidence is admissible, and ruling on potentially time-intensive challenges that Trump’s lawyers could bring.
In their indictment, the prosecutors estimated that a trial would take 21 days in court—not an especially long trial for a case of such magnitude. The timeline suggests the government believes it has a pretty “straightforward” argument, Parker said.
The fact that this case centers on documents Trump had in his possession—illegally, the government argues—means that he may have already seen a significant portion of the evidence the Justice Department has on him. Theoretically, that could speed up the discovery process that occurs before any trial. But cases that involve classified documents tend to take longer, former prosecutors told me, because the court will have to determine who can access sensitive materials and how to protect government secrets before and during a trial. Most of the pretrial rulings that Cannon could make are subject to appeal, and those delays can quickly add up.
Another scheduling complication is that Trump is facing another criminal trial, in New York, on charges that he falsified business records, and he could face yet another indictment and trial in Georgia related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s Manhattan trial is scheduled for March, which would be about 10 months after his indictment in that case and right in the middle of the Republican primary season. (Although the cases are in different jurisdictions, the 10-month lag could be a rough guide for how long Trump’s federal trial will take to get under way.)
One of the biggest questions Cannon may face is whether the election should factor into her decisions about how soon to schedule a trial and whether to agree to delays that Trump might seek. Parker argued that the election is a legitimate consideration. “We are in uncharted territory,” she said, “and quite frankly, I would think that a court would want to try to get this matter resolved ahead of that point.” Even if Trump’s trial concludes before the 2024 election, however, it’s unlikely that (if he’s convicted) his appeals will be exhausted by then.
The former prosecutors I spoke with could only guess at what would happen if Trump were elected president while awaiting trial or sentencing. The case would likely proceed after the election, and the Constitution doesn’t explicitly bar convicted felons from taking office. Whether Trump could pardon himself is a matter of debate; no president has ever tried, but in 1974, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that a presidential self-pardon would be unconstitutional. Even if Trump did not attempt to pardon himself, though, he could lean on or simply direct his appointees in the Justice Department to drop the case against him. He’d surely argue that, by electing him, voters had rendered a verdict more legitimate than any jury’s.
For all the legal wrangling to come, Trump’s ultimate fate may yet rest with the voters. If he is the Republican nominee, they will have what amounts to the final word on his future, political and otherwise. “These cases are important, but they are not magic wands,” Parker said. “They will not relieve the voting public of its problems.”
The Atlantic is publishing a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, known as Zero Tolerance. The records informed the reporting of my cover story on how it came to be and who was responsible. Our hope is to introduce greater transparency around a policy that gravely harmed thousands of families and whose development and intent were concealed from the public for years. During the Trump administration, more than 5,000 migrant children were taken from their parents as part of a dubious and ineffectual strategy to deter migration across the southern border. Hundreds remain separated today.
These records showcase, among other things, government officials’ attempts to mislead the public; inconsistent and sometimes nonexistent record keeping, which to this day means that a full accounting of separations does not exist; efforts to extend the length of time that children and parents were kept apart; and early and repeated internal warnings about the policy’s worst outcomes, which were ignored.
As you will see, some of the records are marked “pre-decisional,” “deliberative,” or “attorney-client privileged” in an attempt to exempt them from federal disclosure requirements and ensure they would never become public. The Atlantic obtained them only through extensive litigation.
The Atlantic’s records, combined with others secured by the House Judiciary Committee, the progressive nonprofit group American Oversight, and separated families themselves, have been organized and tagged for future use. The collection is far from complete, and many of the documents still contain redactions. However, we hope that this database will prove a useful tool for those engaged in research and documentation of family separations, and that the body of publicly available information will continue to grow.
In the spring of 2017, Jeff Self, the Border Patrol chief in the El Paso Sector, which includes New Mexico and parts of Texas, quietly launched a regional program to start referring migrant parents traveling with children for prosecution, which would require those families to be separated. This strained resources throughout the immigration system, including at the Department of Health and Human Services, which took custody of the children. Federal officials would later call the program a “pilot” and use it as a model for expanding the practice nationwide. Some early separations also occurred in Yuma, Arizona, under a separate initiative.
At a February 14, 2017, interagency meeting, immigration-enforcement officials presented a nationwide plan to separate families as an immigration deterrent. Afterward, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services—the agency that would be charged with caring for separated children—pushed back against the plan while scrambling to prepare. The plan was also leaked to the media, after which Homeland Security officials began to assert publicly that the idea had been abandoned. In reality, during and after regional separation programs were implemented in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, the nationwide plan was still being pushed aggressively by leaders of the immigrant-enforcement agencies, as well as by Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s chief immigration adviser, and Gene Hamilton, a confidant of Miller’s who worked at DHS and the Department of Justice.
Though a full accounting of the family separations that took place during the Trump administration does not exist, these internal government charts offer some insight into the nature of those that were recorded. For example, Homeland Security officials have often suggested that some of the individuals separated under Zero Tolerance were actually “false families,” or that separated parents were guilty of more serious crimes beyond the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border, to justify taking their children away. But the first chart in this list makes clear that 2,146 of 2,256 separated parents who were referred for prosecution between May 5 and June 20, 2018, were charged only with the misdemeanor. During the same period, 137 parents were charged with the felony of having crossed the border illegally more than once, while only two were presented with “other charges.” The second chart notes that over those weeks, at least 251 children younger than 6 were separated from their parents, along with 1,370 children ages 6 to 12, and 1,272 ages 13 to 17.
Below is a small sampling of instances when government officials, members of congress, reporters and community groups sought information about a noticeable rise in family separations. Despite these inquiries, for more than a year, Department of Homeland Security officials denied that the agency’s treatment of families had changed, suggesting that business was proceeding as usual and that families were not being separated any more than in the past.
*The government supplied numerous copies of this directive with various portions redacted. The least redacted version has been excerpted here from the Border Patrol’s “After Action Report,” which summarized the results of the separations that occurred in the El Paso Sector in 2017.
Note: The government occasionally supplied The Atlantic with multiple versions of the same email chain or report, and redacted different portions of each. Such documents have been combined in order to show all unredacted material.
The congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection delivered a comprehensive and compelling case for the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and his closest allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
But the committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement of the legion of local Republican officials who enlisted as fake electors and said almost nothing about the dozens of congressional Republicans who supported Trump’s efforts—even to the point, in one case, of urging him to declare “Marshall Law” to overturn the result.
With these choices, the committee likely increased the odds that Trump and his allies will face personal accountability—but diminished the prospect of a complete reckoning within the GOP.
That reality points to the larger question lingering over the committee’s final report: Would convicting Trump defang the threat to democracy that culminated on January 6, or does that require a much broader confrontation with all of the forces in extremist movements, and even the mainstream Republican coalition, that rallied behind Trump’s efforts?
“If we imagine” that preventing another assault on the democratic process “is only about preventing the misconduct of a single person,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, told me, “we are probably not setting up ourselves for success.”
Both the 154-page executive summary unveiled Monday and the 845-page final report released last night made clear that the committee is focused preponderantly on Trump. The summary in particular read more like a draft criminal indictment than a typical congressional report. It contained breathtaking detail on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and concluded with an extensive legal analysis recommending that the Justice Department indict Trump on four separate offenses, including obstruction of a government proceeding and providing “aid and comfort” to an insurrection.
Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the former special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, told me the report showed that the committee members and staff “were thinking like prosecutors.” The report’s structure, he said, made clear that for the committee, criminal referrals for Trump and his closest allies were the endpoint that all of the hearings were building toward. “I think they believe that it’s important not to dilute the narrative,” he said. “The utmost imperative is to have some actual consequences and to tell a story to the American people.” Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney who has closely followed the investigation, agreed that the report underscored the committee’s prioritization of a single goal: making the case that the Justice Department should prosecute Trump and some of the people around him.
“If they wind up with Trump facing charges, I think they will see it as a victory,” Litman told me. “My sense is they are also a little suspicious about the [Justice] Department; they think it’s overly conservative or wussy and if they served up too big an agenda to them, it might have been rejected. The real focus was on Trump.”
In one sense, the committee’s single-minded focus on Trump has already recorded a significant though largely unrecognized achievement. Although there’s no exact parallel to what the Justice Department now faces, in scandals during previous decades, many people thought it would be too divisive and turbulent for one administration to “look back” with criminal proceedings against a former administration’s officials. President Gerald Ford raised that argument when he pardoned his disgraced predecessor Richard Nixon, who had resigned while facing impeachment over the Watergate scandal, in 1974. Barack Obama made a similar case in 2009 when he opted against prosecuting officials from the George W. Bush administration for the torture of alleged terrorists. (“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” Obama said at the time.)
As Tudor pointed out, it is a measure of the committee’s impact that virtually no political or opinion leaders outside of hard-core Trump allies are making such arguments against looking back. If anything, the opposite argument—that the real risk to U.S. society would come from not holding Trump accountable—is much more common.
“There are very few folks in elite opinion-making who are not advocating for accountability in some form, and that was not a given two years ago,” Tudor told me.
Yet Tudor is one of several experts I spoke with who expressed ambivalence about the committee’s choice to focus so tightly on Trump while downplaying the role of other Republicans, either in the states or in Congress. “I think it’s an important lost opportunity,” he said, that could “narrow the public’s understanding as to the totality of what happened and, in some respects, to risk trivializing it.”
Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative strategist turned staunch Trump critic, similarly told me that although he believes the committee was mostly correct to focus its limited time and resources primarily on Trump’s role, the report “doesn’t quite convey how much the antidemocratic, authoritarian sentiments have metastasized”across the GOP.
Perhaps the most surprising element of the executive summary was its treatment of the dozens of state Republicans who signed on as “fake electors,” who Trump hoped could supplant the actual electors pledged to Joe Biden in the decisive states. The committee suggested that the fake electors—some of whom face federal and state investigations for their actions—were largely duped by Trump and his allies. “Multiple Republicans who were persuaded to sign the fake certificates also testified that they felt misled or betrayed, and would not have done so had they known that the fake votes would be used on January 6th without an intervening court ruling,” the committee wrote. Likewise, the report portrays Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, who agreed to help organize the fake electors, as more of a victim than an ally in the effort. The full report does note that “some officials eagerly assisted President Trump with his plans,” but it identifies only one by name: Doug Mastriano, the GOP state senator and losing Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate this year. Even more than the executive summary, the full report emphasizes testimony from the fake electors in which they claimed to harbor doubts and concerns about the scheme.
Eisen, a co-author of a recent Brookings Institution report on the fake electors, told me that the committee seemed “to go out of their way” to give the fake electors the benefit of the doubt. Some of them may have been misled, he said, and in other cases, it’s not clear whether their actions cross the standard for criminal liability. But, Eisen said, “if you ask me do I think these fake electors knew exactly what was going on, I believe a bunch of them did.” When the fake electors met in Georgia, for instance, Eisen said that they already knew Trump “had not won the state, it was clear he had not won in court and had no prospect of winning in court, they were invited to the gathering of the fake electors in secrecy, and they knew that the governor had not and would not sign these fake electoral certificates.” It’s hard to view the participants in such a process as innocent dupes.
The executive summary and final report both said very little about the role of other members of Congress in Trump’s drive to overturn the election. The committee did recommend Ethics Committee investigations of four House Republicans who had defied its subpoenas (including GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive incoming speaker). And it identified GOP Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts” while also citing the sustained involvement of Representatives Scott Perry and Andy Biggs.
But neither the executive summary nor the full report chose quoted exchanges involving House and Senate Republicans in the trove of texts the committee obtained from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The website Talking Points Memo, quoting from those texts, recently reported that 34 congressional Republicans exchanged ideas with Meadows on how to overturn the election, including the suggestion from Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina that Trump simply declare “Marshall Law” to remain in power. Even Representative Adam Schiff of California, a member of the committee, acknowledged in an op-ed published today that the report devoted “scant attention …[to] the willingness of so many members of Congress to vote to overturn it.”
Nor did the committee recommend disciplinary action against the House members who strategized with Meadows or Trump about overturning the result—although it did say that such members “should be questioned in a public forum about their advance knowledge of and role in President Trump’s plan to prevent the peaceful transition of power.” (While one of the committee’s concluding recommendations was that lawyers who participated in the efforts to overturn the election face disciplinary action, the report is silent on whether that same standard should apply to members of Congress.) In that, the committee stopped short of the call from a bipartisan group of former House members for discipline (potentially to the point of expulsion) against any participants in Trump’s plot. “Surely, taking part in an effort to overturn an election warrants an institutional response; previous colleagues have been investigated and disciplined for far less,” the group wrote.
By any measure, experts agree, the January 6 committee has provided a model of tenacity in investigation and creativity in presentation. The record it has compiled offers both a powerful testament for history and a spur to immediate action by the Justice Department. It has buried, under a mountain of evidence, the Trump apologists who tried to whitewash the riot as “a normal tourist visit” or minimize the former president’s responsibility for it. In all of these ways, the committee has made it more difficult for Trump to obscure how gravely he abused the power of the presidency as he begins his campaign to re-obtain it. As Tudor said, “It’s pretty hard to imagine January 6 would still be headline news day in and day out absent the committee’s work.”
But Trump could not have mounted such a threat to American democracy alone. Thousands of far-right extremists responded to his call to assemble in Washington. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general signed on to a lawsuit to invalidate the election results in key states; 139 Republican House members and eight GOP senators voted to reject the outcome even after the riot on January 6.Nearly three dozen congressional Republicans exchanged ideas with Meadows on how to overturn the result, or exhorted him to do so.Dozens of prominent Republicans across the key battleground states signed on as fake electors. Nearly 300 Republicans who echoed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were nominated in November—more than half of all GOP candidates, according to The Washington Post. And although many of the highest-profile election deniers were defeated, about 170 deniers won their campaign and now hold office, where they could be in position to threaten the integrity of future elections.
The January 6 committee’s dogged investigation has stripped Trump’s defenses and revealed the full magnitude of his assault on democracy. But whatever happens next to Trump, it would be naive to assume that the committee has extinguished, or even fully mapped, a threat that has now spread far beyond him.
And that was before Jordan, with incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, repeatedly insisted the FBI had colluded with “Big Tech” to undermine former president Donald Trump by “suppressing” information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.
It was also before reports surfaced that Kevin McCarthy, in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6. This was also before McCarthy threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.
House Republicans and their allies are confident that the investigations will weaken Biden in advance of the 2024 presidential election. “This is not just superficial stuff—this is damaging stuff,” former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me.
But the new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him.
“All these folks are coming out saying, ‘Turn the page; move forward’ … and I think this is really a problem if some of these [House] members are going to continue to look back and embrace Trump at a time when we saw the most Trumpian candidates get their heads handed to them,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told me.
The choices confronting GOP leaders on what—and how—to investigate encapsulates the much larger challenge they will face in managing the House. This month’s midterm election left the GOP with a House majority much smaller than it expected. The results also created a kind of split-personality caucus operating with very different political incentives.
Most incoming House Republicans represent districts in Trump country: 168 of them hold seats that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2020. Another three dozen represent more marginal Republican-leaning seats that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points two years ago.
But the GOP majority relies on what will likely be 18 members (when all the final votes are counted) who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. Eleven of those 18 are in New York and California alone—two states that will likely become considerably more difficult for Republicans in a presidential-election year than during a midterm contest.
For the Republicans from the hard-core Trump districts, demonstrating a commitment to confronting Biden at every turn is crucial for preempting any possible primary challenges from their right, says the Democratic consultant Meredith Kelly, a former communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But, as Dent told me, the Republicans precariously holding the Biden seats have the “polar opposite” incentive: “They need to have bipartisan victories and wins.”
Amid that cross-pressure, many analysts second the prediction of outgoing Democratic Representative David Price of North Carolina, a political scientist who has written several books about Congress, that the new GOP House majority is not likely to pass much legislation. The problem, Price told me, is not only the partisan and ideological fracture in the GOP caucus, but that its members do not have “an agenda that they campaigned on or they are committed to.”
All members of the GOP caucus might agree on legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts, to promote more domestic energy production, or to increase funding for border security. But resistance from the Republicans in blue and purple districts may frustrate many of the right’s most ambitious legislative goals, such as repealing elements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passing a national ban on abortion, and forcing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
With their legislative opportunities limited, House Republicans may see relentless investigation of Biden and his administration as a path of least resistance that can unite their caucus. And, several observers in both parties told me, all sides in the GOP are likely to support efforts to probe the White House’s policy record. Such targets could include the administration’s handling of border security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how it is allocating the clean-energy tax credits and loan guarantees that the Inflation Reduction Act established.
But Republicans have already indicated they are unlikely to stop at such conventional targets.
Jordan, in his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month, warned of coming investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of Project Veritas; allegations that the department has targeted conservative parents as “domestic terrorists” for their actions at school-board meetings; and the department’s decision making in the choice to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.
At the press conference last week with Jordan, Comer declared that evidence from the GOP’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s business activities, including information obtained from his laptop, “raises troubling questions about whether President Biden is a national-security risk.”
Jordan, asked at that press conference about the reports that McCarthy has committed to an investigation of the prosecution and treatment of the January 6 rioters, refused to deny it, instead repeating his determination to explore all examples of alleged politicization at the Justice Department. At one point, Jordan, an unwavering defender of Trump through his two impeachments, delivered an impassioned attack on federal law enforcement that reprised a long list of familiar Trump grievances. “When is the FBI going to quit interfering with elections?” Jordan excitedly declared.
Jordan doesn’t even represent the outer edge of conservative ambition to use House investigations to settle scores for Trump. Earlier this week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted that when Republicans take the majority, they “should take over the @January6thCmte and release every second of footage that will exonerate our Patriots!”
That might be a bridge too far even for McCarthy. But as he scrambles to overcome conservative resistance to his bid for speaker, he has already shown deference to demands from the Trump-country members who constitute the dominant block in his caucus. One example was the report that he promised Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that he would allow some investigation into treatment of the January 6 rioters. Another came in his appearance along the Texas border this week. McCarthy went beyond pledging oversight of the Biden administration’s border record to raise the much more incendiary (but also Fox-friendly) notion of impeaching Mayorkas.
Dent, the former GOP representative, told me that on all these fronts, House Republicans risk pushing oversight to a confrontational peak that may damage its members from marginal seats at least as much as it hurts Biden—particularly if it involves what he described as airing Trump grievances. “These rabbit holes are just fraught with political peril in these more moderate districts,” Dent said.
Democrats hope that the coming GOP investigations will alienate more voters than they alarm. Several Democratic strategists told me they believe that the focus on so many conservative causes will both spotlight the most extreme Trump-aligned voices in the Republican caucus, such as Jordan and Greene, and strike swing voters as a distraction from their kitchen-table concerns.
Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist now serving as a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group mobilizing to respond to the investigations, told me the GOP inquiries will inexorably identify the party with the same polarizing style of Trump-like politics that voters just repudiated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. “We saw in this election that voters reject the Trump playbook and MAGA politics, but that is exactly what they will see in these hearings,” he said.
Congressional investigations always carry the risk of disclosures that could hurt or embarrass Biden and other officials. And whatever they find, investigations also promise to divert significant amounts of the administration’s time and energy. The White House has already staffed up a unit in the counsel’s office dedicated to responding to the inquiries. Cabinet departments are scrambling to do the same.
Recognizing the potential political risk, several Republican representatives newly elected in Biden districts have already urged their party to move slowly on the probes and instead to prioritize action on economic issues. Their problem is that McCarthy already has given every indication he’s likely to prioritize the demands for maximum confrontation from his caucus’s pro-Trump majority.
“If past is prologue, Kevin McCarthy will fall much on the side of the ruby-red Republican base and the pro-investigation, pro-culture-war side,” Kelly says. “He’s never proven able to stand up to the fringe.” And that means the new members from Biden-leaning districts who have provided the GOP its narrow majority have reason to sweat almost as much as the Biden administration over the swarm of investigations that House Republicans are poised to unleash.
The House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot has postponed a hearing scheduled for Wednesday due to Hurricane Ian. This comes as a trial for several Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy is getting underway. CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane reports.
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If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.
So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?
Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.
Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.
It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.
But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.
It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.
I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”
Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”
This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.
On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”
As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.
“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”
I asked her to elaborate.
“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”
This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.
What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.
“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”
“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”
“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”
It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.
Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.
“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”
And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”
It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.
We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.
Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.
