Committee subpoenas Trump for documents, testimony over Capitol riot

Mark Moore, 

The House select committee investigating last year’s Capitol riot unanimously voted Thursday to subpoena former President Trump at the conclusion of their final hearing before next month’s midterm elections.

“We have left no doubt that Donald Trump led an effort to upend American democracy that directly resulted in the violence of Jan. 6,” committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said before proposing the vote. “He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6, so we want to hear from him.”

The 9-0 vote directed Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) to subpoena Trump for “documents and testimony in connection with the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol.”

Cheney said that after conducting “more than 1,000 interviews and depositions” and reviewing “hundreds of thousands of pages of documents” over the past year, the committee is “obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion.”

“Every American is entitled to those answers, so we can act now to protect our republic,” she said. “[Trump] tried to take away the voice of the American people in choosing their president and replace the will of the voters with his will to remain in power.”

The move is the committee’s most serious maneuver yet against the 45th president, requiring him to turn over documents and sit for an interview with the panel or face possible legal consequences – including up to a year in prison.

Trump is only the fourth former president to be subpoenaed by a congressional committee, joining Harry Truman, John Tyler and John Quincy Adams. Of the three, only Truman declined to comply.

However, any subpoena is likely to be a symbolic gesture, only opening weeks of negotiations with Trump’s legal team. The decision to prosecute the former president for contempt of Congress would require an unprecedented action by the Justice Department. 

Lawmakers also have a limited time to secure any cooperation from Trump, with the subpoena expiring at the end of this Congress and an expected Republican majority certain to shut down the panel early next year. 

“Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago?” the former president reacted in a post on Truth Social. “Why did they wait until the very end, the final moments of their last meeting? Because the Committee is a total ‘BUST’ that has only served to further divide our Country which, by the way, is doing very badly – A laughing stock all over the World?”

Before the subpoena was issued, the panel’s members presented evidence that Trump cynically tried to remain in office despite knowing deep down that he had been beaten fair and square. 

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) played recorded testimony from three White House officials – including Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – who testified that Trump privately admitted he’d lost the election. 

In one video, former White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin recalled Trump watching Joe Biden on television and saying, “Can you believe I lost to this f—ing guy?”

In another video, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described hearing Trump calling his defeat “embarrassing” after he learned the Supreme Court rejected his last legal challenge in December 2020. 

“The president’s just raging about the [Supreme Court] decision,” she said. “… And the president said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark [Meadows.] This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

The former assistant to Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, gained notoriety in June for her explosive testimony claiming the former president “lunged” at his lead Secret Service agent, Robert Engel, for denying his desire to drive to the Capitol building to meet his supporters following his Jan. 6. speech on the National Mall.

Kinzinger also pointed to Trump’s swift decisions to order large-scale troop pullouts from Somalia and Afghanistan in his final weeks in office as proof the former president knew he’d lost toBiden.

“Knowing that he had lost and that he had only weeks left in office, President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business,” Kinzinger said. “He acted immediately and signed this order on Nov. 11, which would have required the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan all to be complete before the Biden inauguration on January 20.”

The panel also revealed never-before-seen Secret Service messages to show that Trump allies weeks before the riot intended to use extremist groups as muscle on Jan. 6 as a last-ditch effort to overthrow the election.

“Their plan is literally to kill people,” a tipster wrote to the Secret Service more than a week before Jan. 6.

A Secret Service email on Dec. 26, 2020 noted that the agency had received tips that the Proud Boys extremist group planned to march in Washington on Jan. 6 with a group large enough to outnumber the police.

“It felt like the calm before the storm,” one agent wrote in a group chat.

The House panel also warned that the violence at the Capitol was a reminder of the fragility of American democracy.

“None of this is normal or acceptable or lawful in a republic,” Cheney declared of Trump’s actions. “There is no defense that Donald Trump was duped or irrational. No president can defy the rule of law and act this way in a constitutional republic, period.”

With Post wires

https://nypost.com/2022/10/13/jan-6-hearing-what-you-need-to-know-how-to-watch-thursday/