"No sir. There is no suitcase."

The 1/6 Select Committee told a federal judge in California yesterday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Trump and his allies may have committed not one, but three federal crimes.  In a filing opposing a motion by former Trump lawyer John Eastman to claim executive privilege, the Committee alleged that Eastman and others may have conspired with Trump to interfere with an official proceeding of the government, defraud the American people, and commit common law fraud by repeatedly lying that the election of 2020 had been “stolen.”

The 1/6 Committee does not have the power to issue an indictment, but by detailing Trump’s potential crimes to a court of law, the Committee came about as close as you can get without pulling out the cuffs and pushing him into the back of a patrol car.

Included in the legal filing were excerpts from a deposition it took with Trump’s former senior campaign adviser, Jason Miller, who told the Committee that Trump had been informed “in pretty blunt terms” on the day after the election in 2020 that he was going to lose, making a strong implication that Trump has known all along that his assertions about the so-called “stolen” election were false.  This laid a basis for the charge of common law fraud against the people of the United States. 

The Committee included in its legal brief excerpts from several other depositions taken with witnesses it had interviewed, including one with Richard P. Donoghue, the former acting attorney general who attended several meetings with Trump in the Oval Office during the days leading up to the insurrection on January 6. 

“I told the President myself that several times, in several conversations, that these allegations about ballots being smuggled in a suitcase and run through the machines several times, it was not true, that we had looked at it, we looked at the video, we interviewed the witnesses, and it was not true,” Donoghue told investigators for the Committee. “This gets back to the point that there were so many of these allegations that, when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it, but he would move to another allegation,” he said.

Donoghue told Trump “Much of the info you’re getting is false. And then I went into, ‘for instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about 68 percent error rate – the reality is, it was only .0063 percent error rate, less than 1 in 15,000.’  So the President accepted that, he said, ‘Okay, fine, what about the others?’”

Donoghue went on to detail other facts he listed for Trump that disproved allegations that had been made by people like Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.  “I said, okay, well, with regard to Georgia, ‘We looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses.  There is no suitcase.’  The president kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, no sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over.  There is no suitcase.  There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that’s just how they move the ballots around that facility.  There’s nothing suspicious about it.”  

The 1/6 Committee’s brief laid out a detailed case against both Eastman and Trump and included their efforts to put forth “pro-Trump electors,” spread claims of election fraud, put pressure on several executive departments of the federal government including the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security, and pressure Vice President Pence to overturn the election during the certification of Electoral College ballots.

 “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, plaintiff and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the 1/6 Committee told the California court. 

And there is no suitcase.