The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is expected to discuss in a closed-doors meeting Friday potentially making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

The panel will likely weigh whether to take the extraordinary step of recommending that the DOJ pursue charges against former President Donald Trump, among others. 

The committee’s public hearings this year presented evidence and testimony painting Trump as a president so determined to remain in power that he ignored his closest advisers in pushing false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election; pressured state officials, senior Justice Department officials and Vice President Mike Pence to help overturn the results; summoned his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6; directed them to the Capitol knowing some were armed; and then refused to call off the violent mob or order the National Guard to step in. 

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., created a subcommittee that has been examining possible criminal and civil referrals, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., one of the members of the subcommittee, told reporters last month. The other three members of the smaller panel are all lawyers: Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

In a July public hearing, Cheney said the committee had “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals.”

Speaking to CNN on Thursday morning, Lofgren said she could not say how many referrals members may recommend or whether Trump will be included.

“Anything we send over to DOJ as a recommendation needs to be tethered to the facts that we found,” she said, adding that if a referral is not issued, it does not necessarily mean the committee believes there is not sufficient evidence of a crime.

Criminal referral or not, members of the panel have repeatedly said they believe Trump broke the law in trying to overturn the election.

“It's very clear that the former president engaged in a pressure campaign, some public some private, to get people to overturn the results of the election in really a kind of a coup attempt,” Lofgren said Thursday.

In a July interview with CNN, Raskin said he believes it would be “wrong to punish the people who are seduced by a criminal mastermind, but not the criminal mastermind himself or herself,” referring to the hundreds of people who have been charged with crimes on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6.

The criminal charges the committee could consider include witness tampering, perjury and contempt of Congress.

The referral is not necessary for the Justice Department to bring charges, and federal investigators are already examining Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as well as the removal of classified and presidential documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to oversee those probes after Trump announced he’s running for president again in 2024.

Lofgren said the committee also is “trying to consider what to do with the [House] members who defied the subpoena.”

In May, the committee issued subpoenas to five Republican lawmakers it believed had information about the Jan. 6 attack or events leading up to it: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama. All have refused to comply with the subpoenas.

The House has previously voted to recommend contempt charges for former Trump aides Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino. The DOJ has only elected to prosecute Bannon, who was convicted in July and sentenced in October to four months in prison.

The panel also subpoenaed Trump in October. He filed a lawsuit last month to avoid testifying and handing over documents. The lawsuit argues that the subpoena is invalid because it lacks a legislative purpose, is overly broad and infringes on executive privilege.

Trump and congressional Republicans have long blasted the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation as a politically motivated “witch hunt.” The panel has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including many Republicans and former Trump administration officials.

The committee, meanwhile, says it will issue its final report sometime in December.

It conducted what it believes will be its final interview Wednesday when it met with Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who said publicly that Trump called him this July asking him to decertify Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the state. 

On Thursday, McCarthy sent a letter to Thompson telling him his work as the panel’s chair will end when the Republican majority takes over the House on Jan. 3 and that the committee should preserve all its documents.

“Some reports suggest that entire swaths of findings will be left out of the Committee’s final report,” McCarthy wrote. “ … The official Congressional Records do not belong to you or any member, but to the American people, and they are owed all of the information you gathered — not merely the information that comports with your political agenda.”

Lofgren, however, said the committee will release “all of our evidence,” even materials not included in the final report, before the end of the year. 

“They’'ve been pretty clear that they'd like to undermine the work that we've done, but we're going to prevent that,” she said of Republicans. “We're going to release all the information we've collected so it cannot be selectively edited and spun.”

Garland has, too, said the Justice Department wants all of the committee’s interview transcripts and other evidence. Lofgren said it will all be available to federal investigators when it is made public.

Thompson told Politico he expects the report and transcripts to be part of a massive evidence dump around the holidays, and not rolled out piece by piece. The exact timing on the release, he said, will depend on how long the Government Publishing Office takes printing the physical copy of the report.

Lofgren told CNN it will be available in both printed and interactive digital versions.

Spectrum News' Cassie Semyon contributed to this report.