December 10, 2024
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On Monday, Jonathan Turley, one of our go-to legal experts, wrote a column sparked by a comment this weekend by President Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the whole J6 Committee --- the sham House committee chaired by Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson and now-ex Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney --- “should go to jail.” Turley said that with this statement, Trump has undermined his previous statement that he did not plan to be a vengeful President, that success would be his revenge.
First, let it be said that to remark, as Trump did, that someone SHOULD go to jail is not the same thing as actually SENDING them to jail as political prisoners, as Democrats themselves did with a large number of J6 defendants. Do Democrat members of that committee deserve to spend a considerable amount of time as guests of the Graybar Hotel, considering what they did to corruptly shape the narrative of January 6, even to the point of destroying evidence that was supposed to be turned over to the Republicans who now head the oversight committees? Yes, they do deserve it, and Trump is right to say so.
Turley is right, however, to say that Democrats are going to use Trump’s statement, just as they twist everything else he has ever said, to try to justify Biden’s wholesale pardoning of his son and probably a lot of other people who deserve prison time.
Still, we wonder if Turley should say that “there’s no viable criminal case to be made against the J6 Committee members for their investigation or report.” We’re not attorneys but are dismayed that even looking into this strikes Turley as unseemly when he says, “We need to move beyond the rage rhetoric if this country is going to come together to face the tough challenges ahead.” The point needs to be made (so we’ll make it) that this country will not come together if Biden can just pardon all his friends and allies and there are no consequences for anything any of them ever did.
Trump was absolutely right to criticize the committee’s deletion of evidence from their investigation. “Cheney did something that’s inexcusable,” he said, “along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps.” Love it.
And he went on: “Cheney was behind it. And so was Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”
Turley did say that he considers “the J6 Committee to be not just a colossal failure but a missed opportunity for a bipartisan look at that tragic day.” And that is true. He also made it clear he supports the continued efforts of House committees to finish their own investigation of security failures that day as well as the records of the J6 Committee. We assume he’s referring to what is left of those records, if there’s anything left after all the deleting.
But Turley’s main point was that “these are ethical and political failings, not criminal violations,” as “politicians routinely distort facts on both sides of scandals, including Presidents Biden, Trump, and Obama.” It’s elections, he said, that remove such people from office, as the election in Wyoming got rid of Liz Cheney.
Sorry, that’s not good enough. As Turley acknowledged, “Cheney’s work on the committee was rife with false claims and the manipulation of evidence.” Yes, politicians make false claims all the time, but it’s that pesky “manipulation of evidence” that should not be let go.
Turley cited Article 1, Section 6, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states that members of Congress “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
What on earth does that have to do with prosecuting someone like Liz Cheney, who is not even in the House any longer, for what she did to hide evidence? Nobody is proposing arresting legislators on the floor of Congress or going and coming from sessions. And this isn’t just “speech or debate” we’re talking about, but active suppression of exculpatory evidence in violation of someone’s rights.
Turley said that “the omissions and unfairness of the process do not constitute crimes.” And when he acknowledges that over a hundred files were allegedly destroyed, and that this does appear to violate the House’s archiving rules, he says “this is not ordinarily a case for criminal prosecution.” Really?? Well, if it’s not, it should be.
He says that “these rules have sufficient room for interpretation to make any such claim difficult to prosecute.” If the committee can just destroy evidence willy-nilly, then there’s something wrong with the rules. Do they not have to follow the LAW about destroying evidence, or do laws not apply to them? We guess we’ll find out.
“Clearly, a false statement to federal investigators or an effort to obstruct an investigation can be separate criminal violations,” Turley wrote, “but there is no indication of such allegations.” There isn’t?? This seems, on its face, to be obstruction of justice.
Turley thinks Trump needs to stop “fueling divisions.” (This is like punching someone 20 times, then the second he finally punches back, saying, “You need to stop this violence.”) He’s right about the damage caused by “rage rhetoric,” but he might be mistaken in arguing that Trump’s statement about J6 Committee members needing to go to jail is giving his critics a political windfall. It might be just the opposite, so why not see how this plays out? If anyone deserves to speak with a little rage after all that has been done to him, it’s President Trump.
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/09/no-the-j6-committee-should-not-go-to-jail/
Perhaps Turley’s column was written before Liz Cheney issued a threat to the DOJ on Monday that any move to investigate the now-defunct J6 Committee would be “sanctionable conduct.” Really?? Sanctionable...by whom? Not by her, as she’s not even in Congress any longer, haha. She seems to have mistaken being a former Congress member for being the current Queen of the Universe.
Cheney was triggered by Trump’s statements to rant that he had committed the “worst breach of our Constitution by any President in our nation’s history.” She said he had “attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power.” (Really??) “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol…” (Again, really??)
Cheney said, “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.”
As Bonchie at REDSTATE comments, “There has STILL never been any evidence presented that Donald Trump intended for anyone to physically attack the Capitol building...Trump did not try to ‘seize power,’ and it has been proven that he requested National Guard troops to be present but was rebuffed.”
It was Cheney herself, along with fellow committee members, who buried the evidence of that.
But when faced with evidence of this, Cheney pulled the same aggressive tactics as the Biden family attorneys are doing. (Notice how they all respond like cornered badgers.) “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis,” she said, “for what Donald Trump is suggesting --- a Justice Department investigation of the work of a congressional committee --- and any lawyer who attempts to pursue that course would quickly find themselves engaged in sanctionable conduct.”
SANCTIONABLE CONDUCT? Again, sanctionable by whom?
The GOP-led Congress would be unlikely to do that, even if they had the authority. Perhaps she means the legal establishment, the state bar associations, as they’ve already acted quite inappropriately to intimidate attorneys who dare to represent President Trump. Recall “Project 65,” which was organized to do exactly the same thing. If that’s what she’s talking about, we predict such tactics will backfire big-time.
Bonchie sounds like us when he calls her threats “toothless.” As he says, “the Trump DOJ SHOULD investigate what happened with the January 6th Committee. It should find out how much evidence was altered and destroyed in what was a clear abuse of power and a waste of taxpayer money. That’s what people voted for in November. They didn’t vote for the status quo. They voted for change and accountability.”
And that’s why we non-lawyers have to disagree with Turley on how the J6 Committee misdeeds should be handled. To just let this go is not going to bring the country together, as it will only reinforce the perception (and reality) that Democrat wrongdoers get to skate. Maybe the worst committee members will go to jail and maybe they won’t, but if some do, it will be because they really, really deserve it.
Here’s more on the same subject from BREITBART. Wendell Husebo points out that when Trump was asked on “Meet the Press” if he’d actually direct his FBI director and attorney general to send them (Cheney and friends) to jail, he said, “Not at all. I think that they’ll have to look at that...they can do whatever they want.” (Perhaps Jonathan Turley didn’t hear that part.)
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/12/09/liz-cheney-accused-destroying-117-january-6-files-says-she-should-not-go-jail/
RELATED READING: Never mind Trump’s promised pardons of J6 political prisoners; Biden’s DOJ continues throwing people into jail after almost four years. If anything, they’ve accelerated the process. Biden-appointed and soon-to-be-fired (yay!) DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves has announced the arrest of at least ten J6 protesters since Election Day (!) and says there is “public interest in the prompt and efficient administration of justice.” He plans to make the most of his last few weeks in his job.
DC judges seem to be using Trump’s upcoming inaugural as a reason to push hard these next several weeks. They’re denying defendants’ requests to postpone sentencing in anticipation of a Trump pardon, and three J6 jury trials are set to begin this week. As Julie Kelly reports, “Judge Amy Berman Jackson recently entered an order allowing prosecutors in her extremely biased courtroom to describe January 6 to jurors as an ‘attack on the Capitol,’ ‘attack on Congress,’ and a ‘riot.’” How are these defendants supposed to get a fair trial?
If you want to know what’s currently going on in DC courts concerning these cases, Kelly’s piece is a must-read.
Law professor and Instapundit blogmaster Glenn Reynolds commented on this article, “Something needs to be done about D.C.’s impossibly partisan legal system. Personally, I’m in favor of abolishing ‘home rule’ for DC. Our nation’s capital should be ruled by the nation, not by the apparatchiks who live there.”
https://instapundit.com/689240/
MORE RELATED READING: Don’t miss this piece by Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann at AMERICAN GREATNESS, which spares no words about who the real criminal is in the Hunter scandal. Um, that would be his father.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/09/the-real-criminal-here-is-not-hunter-biden
ALSO RELATED: Former Democrat (but still liberal) Ana Kasparian gets that there’s something fishy about Hunter Biden’s “blanket” pardon covering 11 years. She even did the math and figured out that it had to go back that far to cover Hunter’s so-called work on the Burisma board. Gosh, now she’s actually getting suspicious that Hunter might have done something wrong! You know, even puppies open their eyes after no more than two weeks.
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