By Steve Neavling
Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, said the Justice Department is taking “the wrong approach” to investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Weissmann said federal prosecutors are too focused on the rioters and not enough on former President Trump and others who played a role in inciting the violence.
He said the House committee investigating the Capitol siege has provided sufficient evidence “to inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach.”
“A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people ‘at any level’ criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised,” Weissman wrote.
“The evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one ‘spoke’ of a grander scheme.”
Weissman further explained that “what I have seen in this inquiry is not typical behavior from the Justice Department.”
Pointing to media reports about the Justice Department’s reaction to Cassidy Hutchinson’s explosive testimony, Weissmann said he was skeptical the DOJ is pursuing “a robust investigation into the facts.”
