According to a new court filing, the January 6th Select Committee believes former President Donald Trump and his allies may have committed crimes while attempting to overturn the 2020 election results. The bipartisan panel said it has evidence suggesting Trump broke three laws: obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy and fraud.
“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the panel wrote in the brief.
The filing included a deposition from a former Trump advisor, who told the committee Trump knew he had lost the election, but “the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor.”
The filing is part of the committee’s work to enforce a subpoena on John Eastman, a conservative attorney attempting to keep the select committee from getting emails related to the election certification. Eastman says the emails are protected by attorney-client privilege. The committee argued that even if that was the case, the alleged crimes would negate that privilege.
“The facts we’ve gathered strongly suggest that Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power,” Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote in a statement. “As the judge noted at a previous hearing, Dr. Eastman’s privilege claims raise the question whether the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege applies in this situation.”
