A top prosecutor in Robert Mueller‘s special counsel investigation says he has heard back from people in the Justice Department after writing an essay criticizing the federal inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official and FBI general counsel who was known as Mueller’s “pitbull,” made the disclosure after being asked about it at the end of an interview Tuesday with MSNBC host Ari Melber.
“Yeah, I have,” Weissmann said, adding with a smirk, “And I can’t really talk about it. But I’ve heard from people both inside and people who have recently left.”
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Weissmann wrote an op-ed that was published in the New York Times on Monday in which he said the House Jan. 6 committee hearings have shown “evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one ‘spoke’ of a grander scheme.”
These hearings “should inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach,” he argued. “A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people ‘at any level’ criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised.”
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Weissmann added that “what I have seen in this inquiry is not typical behavior from the Justice Department” and noted how building “a criminal case that looks solely at the riot itself is far more complex legally and factually for those who weren’t at or in the Capitol. These challenges of the current bottom-up approach have led to criticism of the slow pace of the narrow Justice Department approach.”
Weissmann, who played an instrumental role in winning convictions against former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates during the Russia investigation, later lamented how he believed the special counsel “could have done more.” Since the special counsel investigation, Weissmann has periodically appeared on TV to comment on other Trump-related investigations. Bloomberg Law reported in April that he became the legal head at MacAndrews & Forbes.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the vice chairwoman of the House Jan. 6 committee, revealed at the end of a hearing on Tuesday that the panel has delivered information to the Justice Department about former President Donald Trump attempting to contact a witness who has been cooperating with congressional investigators.
