Bennie Thompson says Jan. 6 hearings helped ‘pressure’ DOJ to bring case against Trump

Rep. Bennie Johnson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House’s select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, said the hearings on the insurrection helped “put significant pressure” on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to begin a probe into former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

“I think our investigation made the case,” Thompson said Saturday on MSNBC, adding “I think those hearings, we held, put significant pressure on the Department of Justice to come forward.”

“I think up until that point of the hearings, it could have gone either way. But I think the compelling argument that we made as a committee for millions of Americans as to how close we came to losing our democracy, [the Justice Department] really didn’t … have a choice,” he continued. “And when the special prosecutor was put forth, I think we helped make his case.”

His remarks come after Trump announced last week that his team received a letter from DOJ indicating he is target of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation focusing on his effort to stay in power after losing the election in 2020 to now-President Biden.

“Deranged Jack Smith, the prosecutor with Joe Biden’s DOJ sent a letter (again it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation, and giving me a very short 4 days to report to the Grand Jury, which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” Trump wrote last week on Truth Social about the letter.

The Jan. 6 select committee under Thompson’s leadership spent roughly 18 months in the last session of Congress investigating the insurrection — including interviews with more than 1,000 witnesses and reporting its findings during a slew of public hearings. Following the release of its final report, the committee suggested to DOJ that criminal charges were the obvious next step.

“We were not as a committee a prosecutorial body. So actually, we had to move the documents over,” Thompson explained on Saturday. “But we had testimony. We had witnesses, we identified all the false electors who tried to make the case that Donald Trump was their candidate, all those things, people wouldn’t have looked at it.”

“And I think we actually helped the Department of Justice get to where they are now,” he added.

Thompson isn’t the first member of the committee to chime in after the target letter, either. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) made similar comments last week, arguing the committee’s work “compelled” the DOJ to look into possible criminal charges against the former president.

“I’m not sure that would have happened in the absence of the work that we did on the January 6 committee,” Schiff said on the show. 

Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) have also commented.

The former president’s legal woes only grew this week after Smith levied new charges against Trump in the classified documents case.

The superseding indictment accuses the former president pushed to delete surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago resort and willfully retained an additional sensitive document — bringing his total counts for the classified documents case to 40.

If the Biden administration moves forward with an indictment in the Jan. 6 case, it would bring the total to three. He is also facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over his alleged role in a hush money scheme ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

The Hill’s Steff Danielle Thomas contributed to this report.