Why the U.S. Justice Department will keep a close eye on the Jan. 6 riot hearings
CBC
The findings presented at the U.S. House panel hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol could impact the Justice Department's own investigation into the attack by providing new leads and putting pressure on prosecutors to speed up their probe, some legal experts suggest.
The Justice Department "is going to pay close attention to what's happening, who the witnesses are and what they've got to say," said Richard Ben-Veniste, who served as one of the lead prosecutors at the Watergate Special Prosecution Office in the 1970s.
Glenn Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said he certainly would have been watching Thursday night's hearing "if I were still a federal prosecutor involved in investigating the insurrection."
The U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building held its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation. The committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people connected to the siege and collected more than 140,000 documents.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department (DOJ) has been conducting its own investigation. According to its website, the department has made more than 840 arrests, laid hundreds of charges and recorded more than 300 guilty pleas, including three people who pleaded guilty to the federal charge of seditious conspiracy.
Only the Justice Department can lay charges, but the House panel can send the department criminal referrals.
On Thursday night, on prime-time television, the panel laid out its initial findings, while accusing former U.S. president Donald Trump of leading a multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The hearing featured never-before-seen video of police officers being brutally beaten and of right-wing extremists leading the crowds into the Capitol. But it also included video testimony from former U.S. attorney general William Barr and others who said they told Trump at the time that his fraud claims about the election had no merit.
Randall Eliason, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said there's always a possibility that committee investigators have found something that the Justice Department has not yet discovered.
"The potential is there, I guess. I don't feel like it's super likely that the DOJ is going to learn much that it doesn't already know," Eliason said. "I think the DOJ knows a lot more.than we're aware of. I tend to doubt the DOJ is going to learn some new bombshell information."
Kirschner said he believes that some, but relatively little, of what was presented Thursday night was a revelation to the Justice Department.
Still, the hearings could certainly have an impact on the department's investigation — much like a media story can prompt further investigation from law enforcement, Kirschner said.
"The media can report something, and that is what jump-starts a criminal investigation. We can get information from any source that suggests crime has been committed, that we may need to look into it. The same is true from these congressional hearings."
David Levine, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, said it's certainly possible that there's material that the House committee has uncovered that members of the Justice Department didn't know about and that that material could provide new leads.
