WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 select committee unanimously voted Thursday to issue a subpoena to former President Donald Trump, capping off what could be its final hearing by laying out the case that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election were premeditated.
The move follows months of hearings by the committee to make the case that blame for the insurrection should be placed squarely on Trump’s efforts to stay in power despite knowing he’d lost the election. Thursday’s hearing summarized and built upon evidence of that scheme.
After months of internal debate over whether to call Trump to testify, committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said the panel determined that speaking to the former president was necessary.
“The committee needs to do everything in our power to tell the most complete story possible and present recommendations to help ensure nothing like Jan. 6 ever happens again. We need to be fair and thorough and gain a full context for the evidence we’ve seen, but the need for this committee to hear from Donald Trump goes beyond our fact-finding,” Thompson, D-Miss., said. “He is required to answer for his actions.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who has been abandoned by the Republican Party and lost her reelection bid after taking a leading role in the investigation as the committee’s vice chair, formally requested the subpoena. She asked the public to keep three facts from the past hearings in mind: that Trump always planned to claim fraud if he lost; that he knew his claims of fraud were false and had failed to be proved in court but made a conscious decision to continue claiming the election was stolen; and that the people who ultimately stopped his attempts to stay in power were Republicans. She emphasized that the country can’t rely on the hope that people of conviction will be in positions to stop such a threat to democracy from happening again.
“Our duty today is to our country and our children and our Constitution. We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion,” Cheney said.
Trump is likely to fight the subpoena in court. With just over two months left before the committee disbands, such a move would in effect mean the panel may have little chance of hearing firsthand from the former president as part of its investigation. Trump responded to the vote on hit social media platform, called Truth Social, by questioning why the committee waited so long to ask him to testify.
The committee’s ninth hearing this year, possibly its final one, focused on Trump’s role in the scheme to keep himself in power and provided a sweeping summation of the facts disclosed in the previous hearings.
Trump planned “well in advance” to declare victory on election night, regardless of the vote count, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
“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. It was premeditated. It was not based on ... results or any fraud, if there was any actual problems with voting. It was a plan concocted in advance to convince his supporters that he won, and the people who seemingly knew about the plan in advance would ultimately play a significant role in the events of January,” Lofgren said.
Each of the nine committee members led a portion of the hearing by presenting fresh testimony from new and old witnesses, as well as new evidence obtained from the Secret Service and never-before-seen video of the riot, congressional leaders’ activities and those of Trump’s allies in the days around Jan. 6.
Committee leaders described the hearing’s goal as a step back to look at the entire plan to keep Trump in power, covering the span of time from before the 2020 election until after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Previous hearings each focused on an aspect of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed,” Cheney said. “None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it. Exactly how did one man cause all of this? Today we will focus on President Trump’s state of mind, his intent, his motivations and how he spurred others to do his bidding.”
Thursday was the committee’s first public hearing in nearly three months. In the interim, public attention has been seized by news of the Justice Department’s accelerating investigation into the insurrection and the scheme to use false electors to cast doubt on the election results and keep Trump in office, and on the FBI’s efforts to recover classified materials that were improperly — and possibly illegally — stored at Trump’s Florida estate after he left office.
No witnesses appeared live at the hearing, but the committee showed new clips from the more than 1,000 depositions it has collected along with video captured by Danish filmmakers who followed conservative provocateur Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant with ties to the Proud Boys — a far-right militant group that includes members convicted for their Jan. 6 activities — for two years filming a documentary.
In one clip, Stone said before the election, “F--- the voting. Let’s get straight to the violence.” The committee also played video of another longtime Trump adviser, Steven K. Bannon, saying before the election that Trump planned to claim victory regardless of the results.
“(Trump’s) going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner. ... He’s going to sit right there and say they stole it,” Bannon said. “If Biden is winning (on Election Day), Trump is going to do some crazy s---.”
Trump privately acknowledged to aides he had lost while publicly claiming he had won, the committee said, detailing his attempt to order the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan and Somalia before incoming President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“Knowing that he had lost and that he had only weeks left in office, President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said.
The committee also showed new documents it obtained from the National Archives and the Secret Service. According to the records, Trump consulted with one of his outside advisers, conservative activist Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, about the strategy for election night a few days prior. In a draft statement proposed on Oct. 31, Fitton encouraged Trump to say, “We had an election today — and I won,” and to demand that all votes not counted on Election Day be rejected.
Using some of the hundreds of thousands of records obtained from the Secret Service, Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., said the agency knew about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 at least 10 days before the attack.
One tip sent to the Secret Service warned about the Proud Boys’ plans and said: “Their plan is to literally kill people. Please please take this tip seriously and investigate further.”
Schiff said that “certain ... Secret Service witnesses” testified to the committee that there was no intelligence indicating there was violence that threatened its protectees on Jan. 6.
“Evidence strongly suggests that this testimony is not credible,” Schiff said.
Schiff also detailed multiple Secret Service communications from Jan. 6 about the number of people in the crowd wearing ballistic gear and carrying handguns and rifles. Others remarked on the high chances of violence as the crowd turned toward the Capitol.
The committee again noted that Trump was told about the potential for violence and that many in the crowd were armed, but he rallied his supporters to go to the Capitol anyway. They also detail his repeated orders to his Secret Service detail to let him join supporters marching on Capitol Hill, and how he spent hours watching the violence unfold on television but never contacted national security officials who were scrambling to formulate a National Guard response without his guidance.
To contrast with Trump’s inaction during the riot, the committee showed extended never-before-seen video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., making calls to national security officials from a secure room, pleading for intervention while Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., did the same in the background.
“Just pretend that it was the Pentagon or White House under siege,” Pelosi said at one point when an unidentified person on the phone said he was waiting for permission to mobilize.
The video included Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence talking by phone about plans to resume certifying the presidential election results as soon as the building could be secured and human excrement could be cleaned out of the House chamber.
Committee members have indicated that, barring additional information coming to light, this is probably the panel’s last hearing. But committee aides balked at reporters’ attempts to label it their closing argument, adding that more evidence or testimony could surface before the committee presents its final report by the end of the calendar year.
Cheney said the committee is still weighing whether to make a recommendation about criminal charges to the Justice Department.
Republicans are not expected to renew the committee if they regain control of the House in January.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told reporters after Thursday’s hearing that the holes remaining in the investigation primarily relate to what Trump was doing and saying in private between Election Day and Jan. 6.
“One way of addressing the 30 or so witnesses who took the Fifth (Amendment) when it came to Donald Trump’s own actions is to call Donald Trump in himself,” Raskin said. “It’s hard for me to imagine any American citizen being accused of essentially trying to overthrow his or her own government who wouldn’t welcome the opportunity to come forward and to testify.”
The televised vote came after the panel wavered for months on whether it would subpoena Trump or Pence, though members said they were united in their thinking that giving Trump a chance to speak was the right decision. The move is not without precedent: Other presidents have been subpoenaed to testify before Congress. Raskin added that he doesn’t “want to believe” that Trump will fight the subpoena.
“We haven’t discussed that. ... But I’ll say this, we certainly have litigated in the past. And I think we’ve got a pretty unbroken track record of winning our cases, because all we’re asking people to do is to come forward and testify, and the Supreme Court has been perfectly clear that Congress has the power to do that,” Raskin said.
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(Times staff writer Anumita Kaur contributed to this report.)
