House committee votes to subpoena Trump for testimony
On Thursday, a House subcommittee is looking into the Jan. 6 attack ended its session by voting on whether to call former President Donald Trump to appear. All nine voting members approved the proposal, including both Republicans.
As more than 30 witnesses in the investigation, including key Trump allies Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and John Eastman, invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to the committee’s questions about Trump, Vice Chairman Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. Read the motion describing Trump’s testimony as a liability.
We need to talk to the person who started this, she said. Every citizen has a right to know the truth so that immediate steps can be taken to save the republic. Subpoenas to the president are not unprecedented, but committee members are unsure whether Trump will comply.
Trump already avoided a subpoena in another case earlier this year. A New York judge found Trump in contempt of court in April for ignoring a civil subpoena for documents issued by the state attorney general in connection with an investigation into Trump’s business dealings.
After the commission subpoenaed him on Jan. 6, Trump boasted about his attendance at the inauguration
Trump sent an angry letter to committee chairman-elect Benny Thompson a day after the House voted overwhelmingly to impeach him on Jan. 6. To find out who is to blame for the chaos on January 6, 2021 in the Capitol and prevent a repeat performance, a special committee has examined the incident from every angle.
Trump ignored the subpoena and instead condemned the commission, saying he was writing “to express our outrage, disgust and protest against all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on what many consider a charade and witch hunt.”
He appeared to defend the commission’s goals, saying they were only condemning election fraud “as concerned American citizens.” At a hearing Thursday, Thompson testified that Trump was “the only hero of the events of January 6. That’s why we need to hear it.”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol voted Thursday to subpoena testimony and documents from former President Donald Trump, a dramatic culmination of its year-and-a-half investigation. https://t.co/oI0CqSAfAk pic.twitter.com/DPrb5VlSt5
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 13, 2022
The former president attacked the committee in his first paragraph, in all caps, stating, “THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS MASQUERADE AND STOLEN!” He also mentioned the size of the gathering in the letter, which included an attachment of images of the crowd.
The former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election have been unsuccessful in court, and Trump’s election security appointees and nominees have declared this year’s election to be the “most secure in history.”
Trump said, “I knew, just based on instinct and what I was hearing, that the crowd coming to hear my speech, as well as many others, was going to be very large, much larger than anyone thought possible,” so that he recommended and authorized “thousands of troops to be deployed to ensure that there is peace, safety and security in the Capitol and throughout Washington, DC on January 6.”
It was, he continued, “one of the largest groups I ever spoke of,” “a very wide strip” that “stretched all the way to the Washington Monument.” The fake news media “simply refuses to accept, in any way, shape or form, the scale of what was going on,” but “the sheer size of this gathering and its significance was never before your committee. “