The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee said the Justice Department could charge these 4 Trump allies
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
- The top investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee spoke to The New York Times in a story out Sunday.
- Timothy Heaphy said it's up to the DOJ to keep investigating and "get answers that we didn't get."
- He said Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, and Jeffery Clark could also face charges.
The top staff investigator for the House committee that probed the January 6 Capitol riot said the Justice Department could charge several allies of former President Donald Trump.
"I think you could look at [Rudolph] Giuliani, and Mark Meadows. I think that the Justice Department has to look very closely at whether there was an agreement or conspiracy," Timothy Heaphy told The New York Times in an interview published on Sunday.
Heaphy added that the DOJ could also pursue charges against lawyer John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark.
"A criminal grand jury investigation arguably overrules or takes precedence over an attorney-client privilege assertion or executive privilege. The grand jury may be able to get answers that we didn't get, and I hope that they do," he told The Times.
"How broad the conspiracy extends, I don't know. But it's potentially broader than even the people that we mentioned."
The House select committee spent months investigating Trump and his allies' involvement in inciting the riot and called on several members of his inner circle to testify.
Heaphy said the DOJ's decision on who to charge will depend on them going beyond what the House committee was able to get. Many Trump allies were called to testify in front of the committee but not everyone did, and some, like Eastman, exercised their Fifth Amendment right not to speak.
Giuliani, Meadows, Eastman, and Clark
Jim Bourg
On January 6 2021, supporters of Trump stormed the US Capitol as Congress was about to certify the 2020 election results. In the months leading up the insurrection, Trump had falsely claimed the election had been rigged against him.
After Trump's loss, Eastman drafted legal memos that claimed to offer avenues to keep Trump in office. He and other Trump allies spread the false claims of election fraud across the the country in the lead-up to the insurrection.
Giuliani was one of the most vocal of Trump's supporters spreading falsehoods about election fraud and filing ultimately unsuccessful legal challenges to contest the 2020 election results. He testified before the House committee but asserted attorney-client privilege to avoid answering many of investigators' questions.
Clark, a Justice Department official, also fiercely defended the false assertion of a rigged vote even as the DOJ itself said there was no evidence of election fraud. DOJ officials testified that there was a plan to make Clark acting attorney general after the election, but that top DOJ officials said they would resign en masse if that happened.
Trump's chief of staff Meadows handed over thousands of text messages to the House committee but refused to comply with its subpoenas to testify. Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows, testified that he was warned about potential violence on January 6 in advance.