Donald Trump Facing 'Series of Indictments' After Criminal Referral—Tribe

Donald Trump should expect a "series of indictments" relating to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his role in the Capitol riot, according to one of America's top legal scholars.

On Monday, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress referred Trump to the Justice Department, recommending he face criminal charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, assisting an insurrection, and obstructing an official proceeding of Congress.

The committee also said Trump could be guilty of seditious conspiracy, the charge for which two members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted last month.

Whilst the referral itself doesn't have any legal power, Laurence Tribe, University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, expressed confidence that the Justice Department will take further action.

"If the department doesn't proceed, that is if the special counsel [Merrick Garland] does not return indictments through his grand jury, he would have an obligation, moral and political if not explicitly legal, to explain why not," Tribe said during a Monday appearance on MSNBC.

"And it's very clear that if he recommends an indictment, the Merrick Garland I know is not going to interfere with him the way [former U.S. deputy attorney general] Rod Rosenstein was interfering with special counsel [Robert] Mueller," he said.

"It seems to me that what that all means is we are going to see quite early in the next year, probably by March, a series of indictments of the former president and I think that that's what's going to be needed for the accountability that Liz Cheney said without which the Republic will be in grave danger."

The January 6 committee report, which was also released on Monday, concluded Trump was the "central cause" of the storming of Capitol Hill, which left one of his supporters dead and dozens of police officers injured.

Tribe said that in American justice, "you don't go after only the foot soldiers and let the masterminds, and the ones who pulled the strings, get a pass."

"I think that will translate in practical terms into using all of the tools that are available to the Justice Department to fill in whatever blanks remain in the absolutely magnificent report that we saw summarized today. But the most important of the offenses, the one that would lead to automatic disqualification from holding any future office, was the offense of insurrection," he said.

"And what's important about that is a point that was made, and will not be lost on either Merrick Garland or his special counsel Jack Smith, was a point made in the report today and that was that the House of Representatives already convicted Donald Trump of insurrection."

Trump was impeached on January 13, 2021, for his role in the Capitol riot. In total, 57 Senators voted guilty, versus 43 for not guilty, meaning Trump was acquitted as the two-thirds majority threshold hadn't been met. However, a majority of members of both the House and Senate voted to convict him.

Responding to the January 6 Committee referral via his Truth Social website, Trump said: "These folks don't get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Americans know that I pushed for 20,000 troops to prevent violence on Jan 6, and that I went on television and told everyone to go home.

"The people understand that the Democratic Bureau of Investigation, the DBI, are out to keep me from running for president because they know I'll win and that this whole business of prosecuting me is just like impeachment was — a partisan attempt to sideline me and the Republican Party."

Trump continues to baselessly insist that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, though this has been refuted in court and by numerous independent election experts.

Newsweek reached out to Donald Trump for comment.