The War Against White-Collar Crime: Elite Lawbreaking and the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol

Abstract

The Final Report of the Select House Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol released in late 2022, contains a treasure trove of facts indicating that former President Donald Trump and others around him allegedly engaged in a number of crimes related to the insurrection and attempted self-coup. The unprecedented assault on the Capitol, federal and state indictments, and ongoing investigations provide an opportunity to both examine elite criminality and evaluate government response through the lens of white-collar criminology. This essay considers: 1) how government criminality and corruption are facilitated by rationales and excuses that deny effective social condemnation; 2) their political weaponization; 3) how they constitute part of a larger existential war against white-collar crime that seeks to normalize such lawbreaking; and 4) the inherent difficulties in researching, controlling, and preventing elite crime more generally.

Keywords:

• Criminal neutralization
• government crime
• January 6th
• Trump
• white-collar crime

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Research Assistant Julie Abing for her help in preparing the manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A summary of the Committee’s 14 findings related directly to Trump are as follows: 1) Trump purposely disseminated false allegations to aid the effort to overturn the election and for soliciting contributions; 2) Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election, plotting to overturn the election outcome; 3) Trump corruptly pressured Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes; 4)Trump attempted to corrupt DOJ by seeking officials who would make purposely false statements about the integrity of the election; 5) Without any evidence and contrary to State and Federal law, Trump unlawfully pressured State officials and legislators to change state election results; 6) Trump oversaw efforts to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and The National Archives 7) Trump pressured Members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states; 8) Trump purposely verified false information filed in federal court; 9) Based on false allegations that the election was stolen, Trump summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for January 6th. He instructed them to march to the Capitol on January 6th to “take back” their country; 10) Knowing that a violent attack on the Capitol was underway and knowing that his words would incite further violence, Trump purposely sent a social media message publicly condemning Vice President Pence at 2:24 p.m. on January 6^th; 11) Knowing that violence was underway at the Capitol, and despite his duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, Trump refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television. This failure to act perpetuated the violence at the Capitol and obstructed Congress’s proceeding to count electoral votes; 12) These actions by Trump were taken in support of a multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election; 13) Neither the intelligence community nor law enforcement obtained intelligence in advance of January 6th on the full extent of the ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates to overturn the certified election results. No intelligence community advance analysis predicted exactly how Trump would behave; and 14) Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense could, and ultimately did deploy the Guard. The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns that Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election (House of Representatives & Congress, 2022, pp. 4–7).