Donald Trump has continued to claim that there were no wrongdoings in his actions relating to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He further suggested that he has “total immunity” from criminal prosecution regardless of whether or not there were any wrongdoings.
In a post on Truth Social on Monday Trump dismissed the claims of the House Select Committee responsible for investigating the Capitol attack. He then proceeded to defend all of the actions he took before the riot. The panel sent four criminal referrals against Trump to the Department of Justice, asking that the DOJ change the president with a number of offenses including inciting an insurrection and conspiring to defraud the United States.
The panel then released its 845-page report which detailed their findings during its 18-month investigation into the January 6 attack. As part of the investigation, they also accused Trump of being a central figure in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election results and said that he was central to the Capitol insurrection.
The referrals are widely symbolic as the DOJ is not obliged to investigate or charge based on the referrals. It still remains to be seen whether the Department of Justice will choose to make the historic step of charging a former U.S. president with a crime.
Trump took to social media to say that his actions on January 6, which included encouraging his supporters to “fight like hell” in a speech at the Ellipse and then supposedly not acting to stop the violence for hours, are both immune from any prosecution because he was still the president at the time.
