The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riots officially subpoenaed former President Donald Trump on Friday to obtain his testimony under oath and documents about his role in the 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The subpoena ordered Trump to appear for testimony at the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 14 at 10 a.m., either in person or through a video conference. It also required him to hand over requested documents to the panel by Nov. 4, including nearly all communication he had on Jan. 6 by text, phone calls and Signal.
The committee had unanimously voted to subpoena Trump last week, spurring one big question: Would the former president with comply with the order?
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Trump has indicated he’d only testify if he’s able to do so live in front of the committee, The New York Times reported last week, citing a person familiar with discussions. Even if granted his demand, some surrounding the former president don’t think he should appear in front of the committee at all.
Among the skeptics that Trump will testify is Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor, who wrote for The Daily Beast last week that the chances of Trump will testify are “dim and distant.”
In the subpoena, the committee laid out 10 separate wrongdoings it alleges Trump is responsible related to the Jan. 6 attack.
That included Trump’s well-documented pressuring of state election officials to overturn results, and his incitement of “further violence” on Jan. 6 when he condemned Vice President Mike Pence in a tweet as he watched the attack on TV.
“You were at the center of the first and only effort by any U.S. President to overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power, ultimately culminating in a bloody attack on our own Capitol and on the Congress itself,” the subpoena said.
The subpoena said the committee’s investigation is part of an effort to ensure “that no future president could succeed at anything even remotely similar to the unlawful steps you took to overturn the election.”
After the subpoena vote last week, Trump lashed out in a letter sent to Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), in which he rambled about his favorite topics—how the election was rigged and stolen, Black Lives Matter, antifa, his two impeachments, the Russia investigation, and more.
Amid the chaotic 14 pages of complaints, however, Trump never said whether he’d comply with documentation and testimony requests if issued a subpoena.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s vice chair, has already declared Trump as the “central cause” of the Capitol riot, citing his “repeated lies” about a stolen election and that he “incited his supporters to further violence.”
“Donald Trump knew the courts had ruled against him, he had all this information, but still he made the conscious choice to claim fraudulently that the election was stolen,” Cheney said recently.
Should Trump decline to testify as ordered, it’d be up to the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against Trump—something it’s declined to do to this point, despite scathing testimony over the summer that has tied Trump directly to the Jan. 6 insurrection and proven he profited off it.
But two Trump allies have been charged with contempt of Congress for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas: Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, who was sentenced to four months in prison Friday.
The subpoena is likely to trigger a lengthy court battle over Trump’s compliance. If so, the legal battle could potentially outlast the committee itself, as Republicans have pledged to shut the panel down should they win the House majority after next month’s midterm elections.
Nevertheless, Cheney said that America deserves to hear from the former president himself about the Jan. 6 attack, as so many others surrounding the attack are now facing consequences.
“We all felt that our obligation is to seek his testimony, that the American people deserve to hear directly from him, that it has to be under oath, that he has to be held accountable,” she said.
