(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- The chair of the House’s special committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, Representative Bennie Thompson, said a few weeks ago that the panel wouldn’t be recommending criminal charges for former President Donald Trump after their investigation wraps up.
This week, though, another prominent member of the committee is singing a different tune.
Following the bombshell testimony earlier this week by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, Liz Cheney — one of only two Republicans on the panel and its vice chair — hinted that a criminal charge referral may be coming at some point for the former president.
On Tuesday, Cheney shared an article on Twitter by David French, an anti-Trump commentator, that had the headline “The Case for Prosecuting Donald Trump Just Got Much Stronger.” While the Wyoming congresswoman didn’t add any comments to the post, the fact that she would share it at all suggests that she at least agrees with what the article says.
French praised Hutchinson for the “courageous testimony” she gave in front of the committee on Tuesday. Hutchinson served as an aide to Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff for the White House on January 6, 2021.
In his article that was published on The Dispatch, French wrote the former president may not end up facing any criminal charges. At the same time, Hutchinson helped to set a link between Trump and those people who ended up breaching the Capitol building on that now infamous day.
In his article, French wrote:
“Earlier this afternoon (Hutchinson) gave the most extraordinary congressional testimony I’ve ever seen. She testified that the president was so committed to walking to the Capitol with his own supporters that he allegedly tried to grab the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle.
“She painted the picture of a president utterly out of control, a man so committed to preserving his own power that he approved of the riot and believed that Mike Pence deserved to face mob justice.
“But the most legally significant testimony came in a few key sentences: Hutchinson claims she overheard Trump say about the crowd, ‘You know, I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away.'”
The “mags,” as Trump apparently referred to them, are the metal detectors that were scanning people for weapons as they tried to enter the Ellipse where Trump gave his speech at the Stop the Steal rally before Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election victory for Joe Biden.
If Trump did indeed say those words, it could be liberally interpreted to mean that the president knew that people in the crowd had weapons and not only did nothing about it, but encouraged organizers of the event to allow them to come in with the weapons because he knew they’d march to the Capitol with them later.
While the House panel has no power to charge Trump with a crime, they can refer him to the Department of Justice for criminal charges. While Thompson originally said that would not happen, Cheney may have hinted this week that they’ve changed their minds.
