Jan. 6 Panel Votes to Subpoena Trump as It Wraps Up Its Case

 

Jan. 6 Panel Votes to Subpoena Trump as It Wraps Up Its Case

 

“He must be accountable,” the committee’s chairman said as it presented a sweeping summation of its findings. But the prospect of the former president testifying appeared unlikely.

 

By Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer

Oct. 13, 2022

Updated 9:30 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/us/politics/heres-what-to-expect-from-the-jan-6-hearing.html

 

WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol voted on Thursday to subpoena former President Donald J. Trump as it presented a sweeping summation of its case placing him at the center of a calculated, multipart effort to overturn the 2020 election, beginning even before Election Day.

 

At what may have been its final public hearing and just weeks before midterm elections in which control of Congress is at stake, the panel knit together evidence and testimony from its nine previous presentations while introducing new revelations about Mr. Trump’s central role in numerous plots to maintain power.

 

The committee laid out in vivid detail how Mr. Trump, enraged and embarrassed that he had lost the election and unwilling to accept that fact, sought to join the crowd he had summoned to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, as it marched to the Capitol — knowing that some of his supporters were armed and threatening violence as Congress met to certify his defeat.

 

“None of this is normal, acceptable or lawful in our republic,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman.

 

The committee also showed previously unreleased video from the secure location where congressional leaders hunkered down while the Capitol was under attack. The footage offered a glimpse of the shock and disbelief that gripped them as they urgently phoned governors and top national security officials in efforts to summon the National Guard or get Mr. Trump to call off the assault.

 

After nearly two and a half hours, the committee wrapped up with a direct challenge to the former president, voting to subpoena him to appear for a formal deposition, a step that is exceedingly unlikely given his refusal to cooperate in the inquiry, and could lead to a bitter legal battle.

 

“He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on Jan. 6,” said Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman.

 

“He must be accountable,” Mr. Thompson added. “He is required to answer for his actions.”

 

The former president publicly attacked the committee, but has been telling aides privately that he favors testifying before the panel as long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions. The lawmakers have rejected similar demands from other witnesses, but preliminary discussions among the panel members indicated more openness to a live interview with Mr. Trump.

 

Either way, the vote was an extraordinary turn of events given that Mr. Trump, who has made little secret of his eagerness to run for re-election in 2024, continues to exert heavy influence on the Republican Party, whose ranks are filled with election deniers who embrace the lies that inspired the Capitol attack.

 

The hearing on Thursday came at a pivotal moment, weeks before elections in which Republicans are favored to win the House majority and as time is most likely running out for the panel to complete its work, including an extensive report on its findings. Should Republicans win control in November, they would be all but certain to disband the committee in January and shut down any further official accounting by Congress for the most severe attack on the Capitol in centuries.

 

So on Thursday, the committee sought to dramatize the stakes of its work.

 

In one particularly chilling segment of the hearing, the panel played video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi huddling with other congressional leaders after being evacuated from the Capitol, reaching out to law enforcement and military officials and begging for the National Guard to help put down the violence.

 

“Do you believe this?” Ms. Pelosi says to colleagues as she receives reports that lawmakers are donning gas masks on the House floor to prepare for a breach.

 

Later, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, is seen speaking loudly into his signature flip phone, apparently during a call with Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, imploring him to get Mr. Trump to ask his supporters to leave the Capitol, where Mr. Schumer notes that some senators are still hiding in their offices.

 

“Why don’t you get the president to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr. Attorney General, in your law enforcement responsibility?” Mr. Schumer said.

 

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The stunning behind-the-scenes look came as the panel delivered what amounted to a closing argument to an investigation that began 15 months ago. Members took turns laying out an indictment of Mr. Trump, telling a story that began in the summer of 2020 and, by their own account, has still not ended.

 

Well before any votes were cast, the committee members said, Mr. Trump had hatched a plan to simply claim victory on Election Day.

 

“The ballots counted by the Election Day deadline show the American people have bestowed on me the great honor of re-election to president of the United States — the deadline by which voters in states across the country must choose a president,” Tom Fitton, a right-wing activist who heads the group Judicial Watch, suggested Mr. Trump say in a statement, effectively discounting lawfully cast early and absentee votes.

 

Mr. Fitton, who offered the advice days before the election, indicated in a text message presented by the panel that he had discussed the idea with Mr. Trump.

 

And the committee showed how the president embraced that approach, despite the advice of aides who told him on election night that he could not say he had won. With a coterie of allies, Mr. Trump then sought to stave off his defeat by spreading lies that voting across the country had been marred by widespread fraud.

 

“This big lie, President Trump’s effort to convince Americans that he had won the 2020 election, began before the election results even came in,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California. “It was intentional, it was premeditated, it was not based on election results or any evidence of actual fraud affecting the results or any actual problems with voting machines.”

 

Even though dozens of courts ruled against him and his own advisers ultimately told him to concede, Mr. Trump stubbornly ignored the facts, the committee said, and aggressively pressured state officials, strong-armed Justice Department leaders and sought to create fake slates of electors in states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.

 

Then, with his hold on power slipping, Mr. Trump called a crowd to Washington on Jan. 6, mobilizing both ordinary supporters and far-right extremists, some of whom had expressed their violent intentions in the days leading up to the event, the committee said. As hundreds of people stormed the Capitol that day, assaulting police officers and disrupting the certification of the election, Mr. Trump effectively turned his back on the chaos he helped sow.

 

Chief among the new revelations at the hearing was that the Secret Service was aware before Jan. 6 that some Trump supporters were using online forums to discuss plans for violence, including plots to storm the Capitol. Mr. Trump and key members of his security detail knew on the day of the attack that many people in the crowd that had gathered to hear him speak in Washington were carrying weapons and were possibly dangerous, the committee said.

 

The panel plans to continue investigating the Secret Service’s role in Jan. 6, including testimony it has received about “potential obstruction” and “advice given not to tell the committee” about certain incidents, said Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a committee member.

 

The panel presented more evidence that Mr. Trump had been told by several of his own top advisers, including his daughter Ivanka Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that he had lost the election and should abide by the decisions of more than 60 courts that had ruled against his claims of fraud.

 

But Mr. Trump, mortified by his losses in court, could not bear to do so, according to a recorded interview with Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff.

 

“He said something to the effect of: ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing,’” Ms. Hutchinson recalled in the interview.

 

Still, it was unclear whether the panel would have a chance to hear from Mr. Trump himself. Several former presidents voluntarily testified before Congress — including Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Harry S. Truman and Gerald R. Ford — but there is no Supreme Court precedent that says whether Congress has the power to compel a former president to testify about his actions in office.

 

And two former presidents have been issued congressional subpoenas, John Quincy Adams and John Tyler. While Mr. Tyler testified, Mr. Adams submitted a deposition.

 

Mr. Thompson told reporters after the hearing that the panel did not plan to subpoena Vice President Mike Pence, who was the target of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election.

 

Ms. Cheney, who has arguably been the driving force behind the committee and recently lost a bid to keep her seat in a primary against a Trump-backed challenger, closed the hearing by suggesting that the panel had evidence to make a criminal referral of Mr. Trump to the Justice Department.

 

Then Ms. Cheney called for the full committee to vote on whether to issue the subpoena to Mr. Trump.

 

“We are obligated to seek answers from the man who set this all in motion,” she said. “And every American is entitled to those answers.”

 

Every member voted aye.

 

Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Stephanie Lai contributed reporting.

 

Luke Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of investigative articles at The Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2020. @lukebroadwater

 

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer