Thomas Griffith talks about contentious 2020 election on ‘60 Minutes’

Thomas Griffith, a retired federal judge and former general counsel for BYU, appeared Sunday on a “60 Minutes” segment examining the ongoing fallout from the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Griffith spoke about his research into the 2020 election, the results of which fueled the events of Jan. 6.
He argued that protesters who believed the election had been stolen from former President Donald Trump were “duped” and that there’s no evidence of election fraud.
“All of the evidence — not the speculation, not the conspiracy theories — all the evidence points in one direction and that is that President Biden won and President Trump lost,” Griffith said on “60 Minutes.”
Griffith’s comments rounded out a “60 Minutes” segment that was primarily about efforts to hold Jan. 6 protesters criminally liable for their actions.
As CBS News reported in its summary of Sunday’s episode, “More than 1,000 Americans have been convicted in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol. About 350 trials are still pending and the FBI continues its dragnet for suspects.”
Those convictions, trials and investigations have been controversial, in part because of debates over what the protesters have been charged with and in part because of Trump’s claim that the protesters are “patriots.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of one protester in a case that will affect many more. The justices determined that a law on destroying official records had been improperly applied in some Jan. 6 lawsuits, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Matthew Graves, a U.S. attorney who has worked on more than 1,000 Jan. 6-related cases, told “60 Minutes” that it’s essential to hold those who stormed the Capitol accountable.
“The crime was severe. It was an attack on our democracy. Once you replace votes and deliberation with violence and intimidation, you’ve lost the democratic process,” he said.
But Graves added that his team is not treating all protesters equally. They’re focusing on charging those who forcibly entered the Capitol and threatened others and/or engaged in violent activity.
Griffith, who served on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit before he retired in 2020, applauded his former colleagues’ work during his interview. The D.C. Circuit has heard hundreds of Jan. 6 cases.
“None of these judges is politically biased. These defendants had every chance in the world to defend themselves against these charges and they didn’t succeed,” he said.
Griffith’s interview with “60 Minutes” built on his past efforts to turn the temperature down on debates about the 2020 election.
After that election, he worked with other high-profile conservatives to research fraud claims. They laid out their case that Trump really did lose the election in a 2022 report titled “Lost, Not Stolen.”
“We are a great nation founded on the rule of law, and I am hopeful that by releasing the results of our painstaking review, we will help set the record straight, once and for all,” Griffith wrote for the Deseret News after the report was released.