Criminal referrals for Trump are a historic move against a historically bad president | Opinion

On Dec. 19, 2020, Donald Trump, still refusing to accept he had lost the election, invited his supporters to the nation’s capital.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote in a now-infamous tweet. “Be there, will be wild!”

Exactly two years later, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol urged the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against the former president for what was unarguably an attempted coup.

It was the culmination of the committee’s year-and-a-half-long investigation into Trump’s vast efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The committee recommended that Trump be charged with four crimes, which include inciting or assisting an insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

“We have gone where the facts and the law lead us, and inescapably, they lead us here,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the committee’s nine members, said at Monday’s meeting.

While it isn’t a legally binding move — the Justice Department has no obligation to heed the committee’s recommendations — it’s still a hugely meaningful one. Never before has Congress recommended that the Justice Department charge a former president with a crime, let alone with thwarting the peaceful transition of power.

That symbolism — and the contribution to the historical record — cannot be understated. The Jan. 6 committee hearings were never meant to be a court of law. They have been a court of public scrutiny and evidence, meant to emphasize the moral failings of Trump and his allies at least as much as any potential criminal acts.

The committee sought to pin responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection directly on Donald Trump, and for good reason. It was Trump who decided he had won the 2020 election before it even occurred. It was Trump who immediately began pushing false allegations of voter fraud despite knowing that none existed. It was he who pursued every legal and illegal avenue he could think of to sway the outcome in his favor. And when thousands of Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol, seeking to interfere with the electoral count, he did nothing to stop it. It was, after all, exactly what he wanted.

None of it was improvised. It was premeditated. And even if Trump never faces legal consequences, the committee has shown that Trump does not deserve to hold public office ever again.

Just as importantly, however, the committee has also emphasized that Trump didn’t act alone — the ongoing threat to democracy is larger than just one man. There are, for example, the many Trump allies who encouraged or enabled his behavior, including North Carolina’s very own Mark Meadows. There are the Republican members of Congress — some of them from North Carolina — who willingly aided Trump and his schemes.

Through unnerving revelations and gripping testimony, the hearings have forced Americans to remember something that Republicans desperately want us to forget. They shown us that our country’s past is also its present, as well as its future. To that end, the committee has reminded us that what happened on Jan. 6 is not behind us, and without accountability, our democracy remains vulnerable to the same or similar threats. Two years after the 2020 election, we’re still talking about it. That matters. The most recent election, in which several high-profile election deniers lost, shows that it most definitely matters to wary Americans.

There are many different types of accountability. There’s legal accountability, the kind that the committee is recommending. We hope the Justice Department chooses to pursue charges against Trump and his allies, because nobody is above the law. Justice must finally be served to a man who has evaded it for far too long.

But there’s also accountability to the people you serve — the most basic tenet of democracy. We hope Americans don’t forget who failed them.

This story was originally published December 19, 2022 at 5:33 PM with the headline "Criminal referrals for Trump are a historic move against a historically bad president | Opinion."