The new information revealed by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and deputy Richard Donoghue is enough to investigate former President Donald Trump for criminal conspiracy, according to a former House impeachment manager.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday, former House impeachment manager Dan Goldman explained that it’s time for Congress to look at how to put guardrails on elected officials to ensure what Trump did never happens again.
“That’s part of the reason why the two voting rights laws are so important, to make sure that there isn’t voter suppression, and not only that, that elected officials aren’t empowered to overturn the vote of the people,” said Goldman. “Adam Schiff (D-CA) has the Protect the Democracy Act which has a lot of reforms in the post-Trump world. But none of them go — those reforms go to what occurred on January 6th and perhaps even more importantly, what occurred in the lead-up to January 6th. So, it’s not an either/or, it’s that both need to happen.”
He went on to say that it was clear Trump was on the inside of the domestic extremists’ militias who plotted and planned the attack on the Capitol.
“He was at the front of this push and this effort to reverse the election results,” explained Goldman. “And what we’re starting to see is the drip, drip, drip of all of his efforts to do it. And in particular, and perhaps most egregious to date because we will find more, but to date is what he tried to do with the Department of Justice, which was to take an independent agency, traditionally independent, and use it as his political-legal arm to undermine the confidence in the election so that he — knowing, of course, that there was no truth to it, but so that he could use it for corrupt purposes.”
That, he said, demands a deeper criminal investigation into Trump but also of those who served under him.
“It’s not enough to go after the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and other domestic extremists where the January 6th criminal investigation has focused, it must continue until it determines what the root causes of January 6th were as well,” he said.”
He also explained that it could be happening already and that he assumes that it is because the questioning of Rosen happened so quickly after the DOJ said that it would wave executive privilege for former department officials.
“I would caution, though, that if I were a prosecutor, I would not be thrilled for a witness, a key witness to be providing testimony to multiple other agencies or departments, such as the Department of Justice IG’s office or the Senate Judiciary Committee,” he said. “Not that he can’t, but it’s just from a prosecutor’s standpoint, you don’t want to have so many inconsistent statements that are bound to occur when you have multiple times testifying under oath or not. But, you know, perhaps this is a bigger issue and the Senate Judiciary needs to hear from him, the Department of Justice needs to analyze its own regulations and how its own employees behave.”
It could be an ongoing investigation behind closed doors that isn’t being publicized.
See the conversation below: