Former Mueller investigator lays out a new roadmap for the DOJ to nail Trump for Jan. 6

Writing in the New York Times, a former federal prosecutor who assisted in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Donald Trump suggested that, to all appearances, the Department of Justice is approaching Trump's involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection in the wrong manner and offered up a different strategy that could speed up the process.

According to Andrew Weissman, who led investigations into the Genovese and Colombo crime families, the fact that revelations about the Capitol riot presented by the House select committee are reportedly catching DOJ officials by surprise means they need to change their approach given the resources they have.

Instead, he suggested what he called a 'hub and spoke" approach instead of looking at the "the attack on the Capitol as a single event — an isolated riot, separate from other efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election."

According to the former investigator, "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," before pointing to the work being done by the House committee.

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"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," he wrote. This broader approach would avoid the thorny debate that has emerged as to whether Mr. Trump could be criminally culpable for inciting the riot during his Ellipse speech, or if, on the contrary, his speech is protected under the First Amendment and the evidence too ambiguous to justify the extraordinary step of indicting a former president. Building a criminal case that looks solely at the riot itself is far more complex legally and factually for those who weren’t at or in the Capitol. These challenges of the current bottom-up approach have led to criticism of the slow pace of the narrow Justice Department approach."

According to the prosecutor, using "the context of the other means by which Mr. Trump appears to have sought to undermine the transfer of power" would be a more direct path to making their case against the former president.

Weissman suggested that the DOJ take a tip from the Trump election fraud investigation in Georgia and force balking witnesses to appear before grand juries, writing, "...people can be given immunity to compel their testimony if they validly assert the Fifth Amendment. Obtaining grand-jury testimony is indispensable; it forestalls witnesses from credibly claiming later that they had not made certain statements in an interview or that an interview report is inaccurate (or worse)."

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Adding that the DOJ and the House investigators should be more freely sharing information, he added, "The American public is entitled to a thorough, fearless, competent and fair criminal investigation. That is still possible, and what facts that investigation reveals, and what prosecutorial decisions are made thereafter, will surely be subject to debate. But until we pursue all leads, that debate will be truly academic, to the detriment of our democracy."

You can read his entire essay here.