The Justice Department is already investigating Trump's inner circle, so I wonder how much it cares about the House committee's referral. Trump's guilt, insofar as it's obvious to us as "viewers at home," must be equally obvious to the Justice Dept. And the Justice Dept. is a separate branch of government, doing its own things for its own reasons according to its own procedures.

Therefore, I argued differently a couple weeks ago:

https://tuckerlieberman.medium.com/january-6-committee-final-report-8f2c535245ff

But, to respond to your article: Do you think the Justice Department is really waiting for the committee's green light here? It isn't clear to me what that congressional formality would accomplish. I'm perplexed by the ongoing emphasis on it. It seems to be more of a storytelling device—i.e., at the beginning of Season 1 of this TV series, we predicted the story might end with a criminal referral, but there have been so many twists and turns, and it's gone on so long that the Justice Dept went ahead and opened its own investigation, so the series needs a different ending.