The biggest surprise was the panel’s unanimous vote to subpoena former President Donald J. Trump for testimony.
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The vote to subpoena Donald J. Trump came after the House committee had presented a sweeping summation of its case against the former president and his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Credit
The House committee investigating what led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack held its ninth — and potentially final — hearing of the year on Thursday, rehashing the panel’s arguments that President Donald J. Trump was directly responsible for inciting the violence. In a surprise move at the end of the hearing, the panel voted unanimously, 9 to 0, to subpoena Mr. Trump to provide both documents and testimony about the attempts to overturn the election.
Here are four takeaways from the hearing.
The committee wants Trump’s testimony.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said that given Mr. Trump’s almost singular role in propelling the events of Jan. 6, he must answer questions directly in front of the American people.
“The need for this committee to hear from Donald Trump goes beyond our fact finding,” Mr. Thompson said. “He must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions.”
It’s unclear whether Mr. Trump will agree to a dramatic sit-down with investigators.
Mr. Trump believes he is his own best spokesman and can explain his actions to anyone, and he often ignores the counsel of lawyers, who would almost certainly tell him not to appear voluntarily. Since it became public that the House select committee planned to subpoena Trump for his testimony, the former president has been telling aides he favors doing so, so long as he gets to do so live, according to a person familiar with his discussions. However, it is unclear whether the committee would accept such a demand.
But at the same time, Mr. Trump has recognized the pitfalls of testifying during an ongoing investigation. He recently invoked the Fifth Amendment 440 times in response to questions from the New York attorney general’s office, which later filed a fraud suit against him, three of his children and executives for the Trump Organization.
During the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russia, Mr. Trump provided responses to questions in writing and never directly spoke with investigators.
If Mr. Trump declines to sit for an interview and hand over documents, it is unclear whether there will be an effort by the committee to use the courts to compel him to comply. Such an effort in the court could drag on for sometime, and the committee will be shuttered if Republicans take control of the House in the midterm elections next month.
The panel had little new evidence.
In a string of hearings in the late spring and summer, the committee, relying on a trove of new evidence it developed from interviews and documents, painted a fresh and damning portrait of how Mr. Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” as its vice chair, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, has said.
Since the last hearing in July, the committee has obtained a slew of internal messages from the Secret Service and new video footage of Roger J. Stone Jr. and interviewed other Trump aides. But at this hearing, the committee largely retold, replayed and reiterated footage, testimony and arguments that it had laid out in previous hearings — albeit in an often compelling and highly visual way that communicated again the terror and chaos that gripped the Capitol that day and the initial bipartisan fury at Mr. Trump.
The most gripping new material was arguably the behind-the-scenes footage of congressional leaders after they were evacuated from the Capitol and sped away to a secure location.
The public narrative about Mr. Trump’s criminal exposure has changed dramatically on an unrelated matter since August, when the Justice Department’s investigation into whether he mishandled classified documents and obstructed justice flared into a major legal crisis for him.
Allies urged Trump’s election night victory claim ahead of time.
The committee showed how one of Mr. Trump’s allies, the conservative activist Tom Fitton, sent the White House an email on Oct. 31 with a statement Mr. Trump should give on election night claiming victory based on early returns. “We had an election today — and I won,” Mr. Fitton said Mr. Trump should say.
The committee also played audio and video of another close ally of Mr. Trump, Stephen K. Bannon, saying that Mr. Trump was going to declare victory on election night no matter the results.
Mr. Trump followed that counsel, declaring victory on election night, leaving his supporters with the false notion that he had actually won.
The committee also played testimony from White House aides showing how Mr. Trump privately acknowledged that he knew he lost the election, even as he tried to carry on with overturning its results.
One aide, Alyssa Farah, testified that in a short interaction in the Oval Office with Mr. Trump a week after the election, Mr. Trump expressed his frustration with being defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Can you believe I lost to this f-ing guy?” Ms. Farah said Mr. Trump asked her.
The fact that Mr. Trump privately acknowledged losing and continued to try to overturn the election could be helpful to prosecutors who, in order to gain a conviction, often need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual knew that what they were doing was wrong.
The question of a criminal referral was left unresolved.
“We have sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals,” Ms. Cheney said near the end of the hearing, without naming anyone or specifying what evidence she was referring to.
Ms. Cheney, who has been pushing the idea of a criminal referral to the Justice Department since last year, also mentioned the possibility of doing so in her opening statement, saying that the committee “may ultimately decide to make a series of criminal referrals.”
But the committee has yet to settle on whether to do so. And at this point, it is not clear what substantive effect such a move might have. When the committee first began its work last year, there were few public signs that the Justice Department was actively pursuing an investigation that could lead to Mr. Trump, but the department has since taken a number of aggressive steps including bringing White House aides to Mr. Trump before a grand jury in Washington.
Maggie Haberman and Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
