trial jury they will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that th defendant charged is guilty. that s a long ways away. what you are saying is this indictment process by the gran jury, going back to the ha sandwich analogy, cohen mayb the meat of the sandwich there s a lot of other ingredients that will get them the indictment perfect analogy it is lunchtime across th country in many places after all. let s talk about misdemeanor versus felony on this. where are we on it sure. this is another quirk of new york law there is a crime which i making a false business record it can be charged as a felony, and it can be charged as a misdemeanor, and it can be charged as both. in order to have it be a felon versus a misdemeanor, th felony charge of making a fals
so there was a bit of a, i think in my view bureaucratic fight of this for several months. and what people view that is unfortunate, but does seem now that this is going to be full cooperation. so we re not at a point yet where one might say, oh there specific cooperation or we were seeing eyed eye on these specific criminal referrals that the committee issued yesterday and will inform the indictment process if there is one. i guess if you don t know the answer to that, let me also, ask loop go ahead, go ahead. i think little too soon to read into that based on this. i think what we can safely assume is that the justice department is interested in investigating all these things. not that they ve reached the same conclusions a january six committee put out yesterday when they issued this criminal referrals. so they want to see all the evidence they, can. we know they are really ramping things up. they put out subpoenas in all
so we re not at a point yet where one might say, oh there specific cooperation or we were seeing eyed eye on these specific criminal referrals that the committee issued yesterday and will inform the indictment process if there is one. i guess if you don t know the answer to that, let me also, ask loop luke broadwater. go ahead, go ahead. i think little too soon to read into that based on this. i think what we can safely assume is that the justice department is interested in investigating all these things. not that they ve reached the same conclusions that the january 6th committee put out yesterday when they issued this criminal referrals. so they want to see all the evidence they, can. we know they are really ramping things up. they put out subpoenas in all seven states where the so-called, fake electors scheme, was carried out and we know that that was carried out by the trump campaign, lawyers from the trump campaign. we know that that was the basis of many of
are members of the january 6th select committee. what does the department of justice do with these new referrals? this will be the third and fourth referrals that they ve been forced to deal with. up until this point they ve only acted on one. that was the criminal contempt referral of steve bannon who is facing an indictment and a trial later this summer. mark meadows, the former white house chief of staff, his criminal contempt referral is still pending. merrick garland, the attorney general was asked about it this week, he had no comment on whether or not they re getting any closer to indicting meadows. this will be another big question and put a degree of pressure on the department of justice because what the january 6th select committee is doing is essentially testing the ability of congress to enforce subpoenas like these and if for some reason the department of justice turns down the opportunity to indict or if they go through with the indictment process and are unable to get a
if they refuse to testify, if the committee goes that route and if they re found guilty, that could be the outcome here. that s right. it is a misdemeanor offense so we re not talking about years in jail, but it does carry at least 30 days in jail. now, again, there s still going to be a criminal process. just because they refer it to doj doesn t mean the department of justice is going to automatically take these people to trial. they ll have to go through the indictment process, but that process in a criminal case is usually much faster than in a civil case when you re trying to get a court to uphold a subpoena issued by a congressional committee like this. so we have the january 6th select committee. we have this damning report from the senate judiciary committee. it was a preliminary report. among other findings it says trump asked the doj to undermine the election result nine times. what can be done to prevent a