It now appears that failed, one-term former President Donald Trump may be charged with witness tampering by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
According to the Washington Post:
On Wednesday, the committee’s chairman (Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-MS) pointed to another area of inquiry with both potential criminal implications and an interesting backstory: witness tampering.
At issue is the evolution of remarks made by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was informed recently that the committee wants him to voluntarily cooperate. In the asking letter sent by the panel to McCarthy, Thompson notes:
“Your public statements regarding January 6th have changed markedly since you met with Trump,” Thompson wrote. “At that meeting, or at any other time, did President Trump or his representatives discuss or suggest what you should say publicly, during the impeachment trial (if called as a witness), or in any later investigation about your conversations with him on January 6th?”
The former president has engaged in a form of witness tampering before, most notably during the Ukraine investigation which resulted in him being impeached:
Trump also has a history of doing things that certainly at least walk up to the line of witness tampering, including a tweet attacking former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch even as she testified at his earlier impeachment, and attacks on Michael Cohen invoking Cohen’s family after the former personal attorney for Trump flipped on him. Yovanovitch called Trump’s tweet “very intimidating” in her testimony, while Cohen postponed his own testimony, citing Trump’s “threats.”
This latest evidence of how Trump allegedly sought to make McCarthy change his recounting of what transpired on Jan. 6 could well be added to a growing list of potential crimes committed by the ex-president in connection with that event.
So far, the committee could well send criminal referrals to the DOJ for Trump that include charges of inciting a riot, interfering in an official proceeding of Congress, sedition, and witness tampering. Any of those would result in the former president spending the remainder of his life in federal prison.
