Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) says there has been “one line of effort” to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Americans still haven’t given sufficient attention.
Schiff, a member of the House Jan. 6 committee, addressed the panel’s final report in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday. The piece focused in particular on the Republican lawmakers in Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election.
Even after Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police put down the insurrection at great cost to themselves, the majority of Republicans in the House picked up right where they left off, still voting to overturn the results in important states.
A total of 147 Republican members of Congress voted to overturn the election results — 139 of 221 House Republicans and eight of 51 Senate Republicans.
The committee on Monday sent four criminal referrals against Trump to the Justice Department. In his op-ed, Schiff urged the DOJ to “ensure a form of accountability that Congress is not empowered to provide”: prosecution.
“Bringing a former president to justice who even now calls for the ‘termination’ of our Constitution is a perilous endeavor,” Schiff wrote.
“Not doing so is far more dangerous.”
In a separate op-ed penned for the Los Angeles Times, Schiff wrote that the Justice Department “must hold itself to the standard it set at the beginning of its investigation” into the deadly riot: “Follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
“But there is more needed to protect our democracy,” he continued, “than oversight, accountability and even justice.”
He called on Congress to take action to prevent “another would-be autocrat from tearing down our democratic institutions” by enacting reforms based on the committee’s findings.
“The oversight the Jan. 6 committee did was difficult, and the pursuit of justice may be even more so,” Schiff wrote, “but the steps we take to prevent another despot from subverting our democracy in the future may be the most challenging and consequential of all.”
