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The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol shared motions to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify before the committee during the hearing on Thursday, October 13. The committee voted unanimously to issue a subpoena to the former president. “He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6. So in order to hear from him, the committee needs to do everything in our power to tell the most complete story possible and provide recommendations to help ensure nothing like January 6, ever happens again,” Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said during the hearing.
Before turning it over to a vote, Thompson said that Trump needed to be held “accountable” for the attack on the Capitol and is “required to answer for his actions” to the police who defended against his supporters as well as the Americans whose votes he wanted to throw out.
The hearing was the first since a summer recess, after the session on July 21. The hearing had been rescheduled from its original date of September 28 due to Hurricane Ian making landfall. The committee reiterated points made during prior hearings, including that Trump knew that he had lost the election and that members of his staff had pushed back on him promoting election lies and attempting to overturn the results. Communications obtained from Secret Service members were also presented at the hearing, including that rioters were making threats against former Vice President Mike Pence.
The Committee is continuing their investigation and is expected to submit a report later this year with their findings, about Trump and his involvement in the riot. Both Republican members of the committee Reps. Adam Kinzinger (IL) and Liz Cheney (WY) will also not be returning to Congress in the next term. Kinzinger announced his plans to retire from Congress in October 2021, and Cheney lost the Republican primary against Harriet Hageman.
Cheney has also signaled that she would abandon the Republican party if Trump became the nominee for the 2024 election. “If [Trump] is the nominee, I won’t be a Republican,” she told Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith at the newspaper’s festival on Saturday, September 24. She even said that she’d be willing to support Democrats in their campaigns to try to stop Trump-backed candidates from winning their races, most notably preventing Kari Lake from winning the Wyoming gubernatorial race.
Since the last hearing, Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago was raided by FBI agents, following a Justice Department investigation, which found that the former president had taken classified documents to his private residence. The DOJ revealed that FBI agents uncovered over 100 classified documents during the August 8 search, and its suspected that there may still be more, according to CNBC.
During the first hearing back in June, Cheney didn’t hold back in calling out Trump for provoking his supporters to invade the Capitol on January 6. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said, during opening statements.
Prior to the hearing, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) had teased that this hearing may be “more sweeping than some of the other hearings,” during an appearance on CNN. He also said that the hearing would shed new light on previously presented material as well as bring new findings forward. “The public will certainly learn things it hasn’t seen before, but it will also understand information it already has in a different context by seeing how it relates to other elements of this plot,” he said.
During the most recent prior hearing in July, outtakes of Trump’s speech following the attack were shown, including a clip of him cutting the phrase “The election is over” out of his speech. An anonymous security official also revealed that members of former Vice President Mike Pence’s security detail made calls “to say goodbye to family members,” as the mob attacked.
