Jan. 6 committee votes unanimously to subpoena Trump
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol voted Thursday to subpoena former President Donald Trump over his role in the insurrection.
The panel voted unanimously — with two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining the panel’s seven Democrats — to call Trump to testify.
“It is our obligation to seek Donald Trump’s testimony,” said the panel's chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. “Donald Trump is the one man at the center of [Jan. 6], so we want to hear from him. The committee needs to do everything in our power to tell the most complete story possible."
Acknowledging that the vote to subpoena a former president was “a serious and extraordinary action,” Thompson said he called the vote at the conclusion of Thursday’s hearing in order to be transparent.
“That’s why we want to take this step in full view of the American people,” he said.
Cheney, a onetime Trump stalwart who broke with the former president because of his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election, offered the measure to subpoena Trump.
“We must seek the testimony of Jan. 6’s central player,” Cheney said, citing the repeated efforts of Trump’s closest confidants in the effort, including Roger Stone, a longtime associate, and Michael Flynn, a former general who was briefly Trump's national security adviser, to stonewall the committee using their right to invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination.
The vote to subpoena Trump came after the committee had delivered two hours of videotaped testimony at the 10th hearing devoted to investigating the events surrounding the violent attack on the Capitol. Throughout the hearing, the focus was on Trump's role in the events.
"The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man: Donald Trump, whom many others followed," Cheney, the panel's co-chair, said in her opening statement.
It remains unlikely, however, that Trump would agree to sit for questioning by the committee, and that the House of Representatives would vote to compel him to do so.
The panel played testimony Thursday from Trump’s top aides at the time, who said Trump privately admitted that he knew he had lost, in one instance even attempting a rapid pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan with the clock running out on his time in office.
Meanwhile, in public, on Twitter and at White House press conferences, Trump continued to promote the lie that he had won the 2020 election.
Spokespeople for the former president did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
