Impeachment Lawyer Calls For ‘Criminal Investigation’ Into Trump’s Conduct Leading Up to Jan. 6

One of the House Democratic lawyers during the inquiry that led to former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment has called for a “criminal investigation” of Trump’s conduct leading up to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.

Daniel Goldman, who served as the counsel for the Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee and questioned witnesses who appeared before the committee during the 2019 impeachment inquiry against Trump, called for this move on Tuesday during Deadline: White House on MSNBC, where Goldman is now a legal analyst.

This comes in the aftermath of former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen telling the Senate Judiciary Committee on Saturday that Jeffrey Clark, who was serving as Trump’s top environment lawyer at the Department of Justice, tried to get the DOJ to call on Georgia to investigate its 2020 elections results for possible voter fraud.

Goldman said that there should be both a congressional and criminal probe of Trump’s conduct ahead Jan. 6.

“I think Congress needs to take a very close look at what happened because Congress can and should pass laws that provide narrower guardrails on our elected officials so that this can’t happen again,” he said.

“That’s part of the reason why the two voting rights laws are so important, to make sure that there isn’t voter suppression. And not only that, that elected officials are not empowered to overturn the will of the people,” continued Goldman, referring to the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

The For the People Act passed the House of Representatives and was blocked in the Senate by Republicans, while the John Lewis Voting Rights Act has yet to be reintroduced in Congress. Those bills have been criticized by Republicans as the federal government seeking to subvert electoral integrity, which are done by the individual states.

Goldman mentioned that his former boss, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “has the [Protecting Our Democracy] Act, which has a lot of reforms in the post-Trump world.”

That bill was introduced by Schiff in September but died in committees. It has since not been reintroduced.

However, said Goldman, none of “those reforms go to what occurred on January 6 and, perhaps even more importantly, what occurred in the lead-up to January 6. So it’s not an either-or, it’s that both need to happen.”

“But what is becoming clear is that Donald Trump was not on the outside looking in while some domestic violent extremists who supported him were concocting this plan to raid the Capitol,” he continued. “No. He was at the front of this push and this effort to reverse the election results. And what we’re starting to see is the drip, drip, drip of all of his efforts to do it.”

Goldman went on to say that “perhaps most egregious” act Trump did ahead of the Capitol attack was reportedly using the Department of Justice to subvert the 2020 election.

“In particular, and perhaps most egregious to date because we will find more, but to date is what he tried to do with the Department of Justice, which was to take an independent agency, traditionally independent, and use it as his political legal arm to undermine the confidence in the election so that he – knowing, of course, that there was no truth to it, but so that he could use it for corrupt purposes,” he said.

“That requires a deeper criminal investigation into not only Donald Trump, but all those under him,” continued Goldman. “It’s not enough to go after the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and other domestic violent extremists which is where the January 6th criminal investigation has focused. It must continue until it determines what the root causes of January 6th were as well.”

In response to anchor Nicolle Wallace asking if such an investigation is already underway, Goldman said, “No. It very well could be. And it probably is. I would assume it is.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.