Illinois Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi lamented that the Justice Department is moving too slowly when it comes to Jan. 6-related cases.
A few days ago, a former prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller's team, Andrew Weissmann, explained that the DOJ started at a different vantage point than the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Congress. They were working not on prosecuting attackers but on getting to the bottom of what happened to cause Jan. 6 and those involved in refusing to protect the Capitol.
Speaking to MSNBC on Sunday, Krishnamoorthi said that the committee has really sifted through everything to reveal the extent to which Donald Trump contributed to the Jan. 6 attack and the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.
"The eerie resemblance between what he was tweeting and what was being said at the rallies and goes to just this whole issue of his corrupt intent with regard to that day, that's perhaps the most difficult element to prove with regard to any charges that might be leveled against him or others at the white house," said Krishnamoorthi. "I think that whether he knew what he was doing was wrong at the time he was doing it, and whether he was consciously inspiring people to essentially what to do what they did on Jan. 6th, which was breached the Capitol, commit an insurrection. Those all go to the heart of the hearings and the investigation the committee is doing. for that matter, what the DOJ is doing as well."
"It has been very slow in my view," he said about the DOJ investigation. "We are now more than a year and a half after the events of Jan. 6th. Still, there seem to be at least, from what we can gather in the public record, areas that the Justice Department hasn't fully investigated. The Justice Department knew, for example, that Donald Trump was on the phone with a Secretary of State of Georgia, demanding that the secretary find 11,780 votes that don't exist. He had that information for a long-time. I don't think that should be left to the Fulton County district attorney alone."
Krishnamoorthi went on to say that the DOJ should be capable of doing both the cases of the insurrectionists and the former president's involvement in attempting to overthrow the election.
"I mentioned this before on your program months ago -- there doesn't seem to be the hustle necessary to really pursue these cases to the ground," he lamented. "Absolutely, they need to do everything they can to determine whether wrongdoing was committed and who should be held culpable. They need to make sure that if anything proceeds, they do so successfully."
Yet, there is a slowness to the investigation that he questions.
"Why have we not done more faster?" Krishnamoorthi asked. "Still, only 800 of the thousand to 2000 people who actually breached the Capitol have actually been prosecuted or arrested, even. We still don't even know who planted the bomb found 200 feet -- from my office window on that day. People like me do this from a professional and personal perspective, as being rather distressing."
He concluded by saying that there is a need to go faster and an election is coming up. While he said the DOJ shouldn't focus on the political aspects of the calendar, if Republicans take over the Congress, they can do things to slow the probe at the DOJ, he said.
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