January 6th Committee Forms New Committee To Make Decisions About Criminal Referrals

The January 6th Committee has created a new subcommittee that will make determinations about criminal referrals before the Committee comes to an end next month. With Republicans retaking the House, the Committee is now working against a hard deadline to get everything completely finished before the end of the year, so criminal referrals could be coming much sooner than we think. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

Check out our merch by visiting our store

Subscribe to our podcast

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The January 6th committee has announced the creation of a new January 6th subcommittee that consists of Jamie Raskin, Zoe Lofgren, um, uh, uh, uh, Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff. And the job of this new subcommittee is to determine whether or not, and if, whether then which criminal referrals to send to the Department of Justice. Here's what's happening. That January 6th committee, they see the writing on the wall. They know that their time is up. It's disappointing that their time is up because their job is not even close to being done. There is still so many, uh, people there, there, there's so many things that we didn't even get to hear about, they didn't get to hear about. We did not even scratch the surface of the events of January 6th. The events running up to it, the events after it, there's still so much we didn't know. And unfortunately, I think those are things that forever we will not know.

But now we're at the point, right? We're at the goal line. And so Benny Thompson, the chair of the committee, said, all right, you four, it's your job. Go and determine whether or not we're sending criminal charges. We're kind of done here. That is a huge leap forward for this committee. Thompson also said that they are working on the final report, which will come out in December because they know they would love to continue the job, right? Let's be perfectly clear about that, and I would love for them to continue the job. But Republicans starting on January 3rd, they got the majority in that house. The first thing they're gonna do if that committee still existed is kill it metaphorically, hopefully, but it wouldn't exist anymore. So they've gotta get everything done in a month. That's all the time we've got one month. But I do think it's very telling that he picked those four members, Raskin, Cheney, Schiff, and Lofgren. Those have been some of the more outspoken folks. Those are definitely the biggest anti-Trump folks. So it almost seems like Benny Thompson wanted to send the people who hate Trump the most to determine whether or not we're gonna charge Donald Trump.

So I won't be surprised if that four member subcommittee does recommend charging Donald Trump. Now, the problem with all of that, of course, is that the committee itself cannot charge. All they can do is refer. So they would then send the charges to the doj. The DOJ would look at them and say yes or no. If they say no, then it's done. Nothing we can do about it. If they say yes, then hold your horses folks, because we've got some pretty fun times up ahead of us. So that's what's happening. But there are, according to reports, some members of the main January 6th committee that don't even think any criminal referrals are necessary, which is kind of scary. You know, you've, you've looked through all of this and you're like, ah, we're

Fine. But the reason they don't think any is necessary is cuz they think the DOJ is gonna, you know, they're gonna do it. They're gonna get everybody, you know, we, we don't need to do this cuz they've got a handle on it. No. If there's one thing we've learned about Merrick Garland's, doj, it's that you kind of have to tell them what to do. And plus you wanna be on record as saying you recommended this. You don't wanna end this committee with no criminal referrals whatsoever in just a binder of information you put out as your final report. Nobody's gonna care about the binder, they're gonna care about the criminal referrals.