While the world was transfixed, with good reason, on the horrific invasion of Ukraine by the Russians, two events occurred here at home last Wednesday that were truly momentous if you hate fascism and believe in the rule of law.

The first was when Joshua James, a leader of the fascist Oath Keepers organization, pleaded GUILTY to sedition. James had been charged with multiple felonies of obstructing the formal count of the electoral college, assaulting a police officer inside the Capitol, and attempting to destroy records of his communication with other Oath Keepers. As part of his guilty plea, charges other than seditious conspiracy and obstruction were dropped.

James is admitting that he helped lead two tactically equipped teams that were sent into the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and organize the stockpiling of a cache of weapons in a hotel just outside of Washington, D.C. He also pleaded guilty to one count of obstructing an official proceeding, a felony that many of the January 6th insurrectionists have been charged with. Perhaps even more importantly, James agreed to cooperate with Federal investigators, who have charged ten others, including Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, with sedition.

James’ guilty plea is the first successful prosecution of sedition in twenty years. Seditious conspiracy is defined in Federal law as when two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,” or act “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” James’ indictment reveals that the Oath Keepers began planning for a “civil war” two days after the 2020 election. In the plea agreement, James agreed that Rhodes “instructed [him] and others to be prepared and called upon to … use lethal force if necessary” to keep Trump in office.

James’ guilty plea and Rhodes’ upcoming trial are just the start of an effort to destroy a leading fascist group allied with the White Supremacist QAnon Trump party.

The other event on Wednesday was a filing made by the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection in response to a legal attempt by Trump campaign lawyer John Eastman to avoid turning over 10,000 emails to the committee. This is a civil case, but if you ever wanted to know—and if you like anything like democracy and the rule of law, you should—whether the committee’s work will culminate in a criminal referral against Donald Trump to the Department of Justice, you got your answer on Wednesday.

According to the committee:

“The evidence detailed above provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated section 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). The elements of the offense under 1512(c)(2) are: (1) the defendant obstructed, influenced or impeded, or attempted to obstruct, influence or impede, (2) an official proceeding of the United States, and (3) that the defendant did so corruptly.”

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. An individual “defrauds” the government for purposes of Section 371 if he “interfere[s] with or obstruct[s] one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.”

“There is also evidence to support a good-faith, reasonable belief that in camera review of the materials may reveal that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The District of Columbia, where these events occurred, defines common law fraud as: (1) a false representation; (2) in reference to material fact; (3) made with knowledge of its falsity; (4) with the intent to deceive; and (5) action is taken in reliance upon the representation.”

The filing is an amazing read. (You can see the full text here: gov.uscourts.cacd.841840.160.0.pdf (courtlistener.com).) It lays out in great detail the evidence of the conspiracy led by Trump and his allies in government to overturn a free and fair election by convincing his followers that that election was fraudulent and by relentlessly pressuring government officials to buy into narratives that Trump knew were false.

The filing shows beyond a doubt that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were, in Attorney General Bill Barr’s word, “bullshit” because his own team was telling him that, including Trump’s own lawyers, who NEVER claimed fraud in court, Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Department of Homeland Security head Ken Cuccinelli, senior Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. Outside Trump’s own circle, he heard from the sixty judges (some of whom he had appointed) who ruled that his election challenges were baseless, the New York state bar association, which yanked Rudy Guiliani’s law license because he made “false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public” regarding the election, and the Michigan judge who sanctioned Trump attorneys Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and seven others for “deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated.”

The committee made it clear on Wednesday that it will send a criminal referral against Donald Trump, and many of his confederates, to the Justice Department before this fall’s elections.

The filing contains some remarkable windows into the chaos Trump created inside his administration as he insisted, without any proof, that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and about the actions of various governmental hacks and professional weasels who tried to grab power and influence in the middle of that chaos.

Take Jeffrey Clark. Clark is a Harvard grad who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of George Bush’s Justice Department and was later appointed to that same position by Donald Trump. His long-time associate, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, helped get Clark appointed to the Justice Department's Civil Division. After the 2020 election, Clark was the only senior official in the Department of Justice who backed Trump’s claims of fraud. Then Bill Barr resigned as Attorney General. The standard procedure was for Rosen, Barr’s top deputy, to become Acting Attorney General. Imagine Rosen’s surprise, then, when Clark invited him and Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Donoghue to a meeting and informed them that he had been to the White House to report on “his own investigation” into the election and that Trump was about to announce that he, Clark, would be named Acting Attorney General.

Clark hadn’t counted on the threat of a full-scale mutiny.

Things came to a head in a meeting that Trump called on January 3 in the Oval Office to decide Rosen’s fate. In attendance were Trump, White House counsel Pat Cippolone, Clark, and Justice Department leaders Pat Philbin, Jeffrey Rosen, Steve Engel, and Richard Donoghue. Donoghue, a no-nonsense Brooklyn native and Army veteran who had spent weeks investigating specific conspiracy theories about the election and trying to convince Trump that they were totally unfounded, took the lead in drawing a line in the sand against Clark’s bizarre self-promotion.

As Donoghue relates in his deposition for the January 6th committee, “Jeff Clark certainly was advocating for change in leadership that would put him at the top of the Department, and everyone else in the room was advocating against that and talking about what a disaster this would be.”

“He repeatedly said to the President that, if he was put in the seat, he would conduct real investigations that would, in his view, uncover widespread fraud; he would send out the letter that he had drafted; and that this was a last opportunity to sort of set things straight with this defective election, and that he could do it, and he had the intelligence and the will and the desire to pursue these matters in the way that the President thought most appropriate.”

“I made the point that Jeff Clark is not even competent to serve as the Attorney General. He's never been a criminal attorney. He's never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He's never been in front of a grand jury, much less a trial jury. And he kind of retorted by saying, ‘Well, I've done a lot of very complicated appeals and civil litigation, environmental litigation, and things like that.’ And I said, ‘That's right. You're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill.”

“I remember saying at some point that, you know, Jeff wouldn't even know how to find his way to Chris Wray's office, much less march in there and direct the FBI what to do, and that, ‘If you walked into Chris Wray's office, he wouldn't even know who you are. So we had these conversations that went around and around and were very blunt and direct.”

When asked by Trump how they would react if he installed Clark, each of the attorneys threatened to resign. Donoghue told Trump that “I wouldn’t serve one minute this guy.”

Trump then turned to Steve Engel, and asked him, “Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?”

“Steve Engel— I remember this because it was very vivid — said, ‘No, Mr. President,” Donoghue told the committee. “’If you replace Jeff Rosen with Jeff Clark and send this letter, I would have no choice. I would have to resign.’”

In a stunning comment considering that he was proposing to cause the resignations of the entire leadership of the Justice Department and his own White House counsel, Trump asked, “What have I got to lose I do this?”

Donoghue responded by saying “Mr. President, these aren't bureaucratic leftovers from another administration. You picked them. This is your leadership team. You sent every one of them to the Senate; you got them confirmed. What is that going to say about you, when we all walk out at the same time? ... And what happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions? What does that say about your leadership?”

Again, from Donoghue’s testimony: “He [Trump] did say several times, ‘You two,’ pointing at Mr. Rosen and me, ‘You two 24 haven't done anything. You two don't care. You haven't taken appropriate actions. Everyone tells me I should fire you," and things of that nature.”

At the end of the three-hour meeting, Trump reversed himself and decided not to replace Rosen. Pointing to Rosen, the President said, “I know that these two here, they're not going to do anything. They're not going to fix this. But that's the way it is, and I'm going to let it go anyway.”

It was the Justice Department lawyers who, with the exception of the ambitious Jeffrey Clark, against Trump’s claims of election fraud. If Trump ends up going on trial for his post-election crimes, it will be the Justice Department lawyers who send him there.