'Wolves Will Become Sheep': Ex-US House Speaker Warns 6 January Panel Might Face Jail After Midterms

According to media reports, Democratic strategists fear that the party will face a "shellacking" in the 2022 midterms in no small part due to the president's falling approval ratings. With a small margin for error in the House and evenly split Senate, the Democrats risk losing both chambers in one election.

Former Speaker of the US House Newt Gingrich has warned in an interview with Fox News that the tables might turn for the 6 January committee after the 2022 midterms. Expanding on his earlier op-ed published in Newsweek, Gingrich suggested that the panel might face jail time for what they are doing now, if the Republicans manage to win back Congress – something that has not been ruled out by some political analysts.

"What they need to understand is on 4 January next year, you're going to have a Republican majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate. And all these people who have been so tough, and so mean, and so nasty are going to be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every e-mail".

Gingrich said that both the 6 January committee and Attorney General Merrick Garland had "run amok" and turned into a "lynch mob". The former House speaker went on to accuse the members of the panel of "running over peoples' civil liberties" in their quest to punish former President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they suspect of plotting an "insurgency" on 6 January 2021.

"And the wolves are going to find out that they're now sheep and they're the ones who are in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they're breaking".

The House committee, launched by and consisting mostly of Democrats (as well as some Republicans dubbed "RINOs" by fellow party members), has indeed issued a broad net of subpoenas, including for records of communications of congresspeople and former Trump administration officials in the hopes of finding incriminating evidence against the ex-POTUS and his staff. The former president slammed their efforts as another "witch hunt" and has repeatedly rejected the claims that he incited an insurgency.

The committee was launched in the wake of hundreds of Trump supporters forcing their way into Congress on 6 January after attending a rally by the then-president. Democrats insist that Trump incited the protesters' actions by perpetuating his claims of election fraud. The then-POTUS, however, later condemned the actions of the crowd urging them to vacate the Capitol.

Trump has so far failed to prove his accusations of election fraud, purportedly committed by Democrats, in multiple courts. At the same time, several voting audits, initiated by Republicans in the states of Texas, Arizona, and Michigan, found minor anomalies, which Trump sees as grounds for further investigation and possibly challenging the 2020 presidential election results.