While the decision to subpoena Donald Trump to appear before the January 6 Committee will attract more headlines, the immediate legal threat to the disgraced former president stems from his theft of classified documents and his attempts to obstruct efforts to return them.
Overnight, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection voted unanimously to subpoena Trump. “He must be accountable,” Bennie G Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, said.
The committee also released an array of material further implicating Trump in the incitement of the insurrection. New material from the Secret Service emerged that contradicted previous testimony both from Secret Service officials and former Trump staff that the violent nature of the protests on January 6 took them by surprise. Instead, it’s now clear the Secret Service was aware that attendees planned to bring weapons, and was directly warned of the violent — and perhaps even lethal — intentions of Trump supporters.
The committee also produced new corroboration of previous evidence that Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was told by Trump in response to McCarthy’s request that the president call off the insurrectionists: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” McCarthy has never confirmed the conversation, but multiple sources have now said McCarthy told them of the exchange.
The committee released testimony that showed Trump was aware he’d lost the election: former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided some of the most damning evidence against Trump, revealed that Trump, after the US Supreme Court refused to hear attempts to overturn the election, told his chief of staff Mark Meadows, “I don’t want people to know we lost.”
The committee also revealed a plan by right-wing supporters of Trump to declare victory before the results were known on the night of the election, including by claiming a fictional “election day deadline” — to such an extent that aides to then vice president Pence tried to work out ways to avoid Pence being forced to offer an opinion.
But while the subpoena is big news, the committee is running out of time before the mid-term elections on November 8, which despite Democratic resurgence are still tipped to deliver control of the House to Republicans. McCarthy has already indicated he will kill the committee off if he becomes majority leader. One view is that the subpoena, which Trump will refuse to comply with, is a pro forma effort by the committee to say it offered Trump a chance to testify before issuing its final report.
The committee also released footage taken during the insurrection as House and Senate leaders on both sides frantically call a variety of officials, governors and military commanders in the search for assistance in securing the Capitol.
Trump’s far more immediate concern is prosecution over his theft of classified documents and his efforts to prevent their return after repeated demands that he surrender them. Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that one of Trump’s aides at his Mar-a-Lago estate has dramatically altered their evidence after being interviewed by the FBI, and admitted Trump ordered boxes of classified documents to be moved to his residence following a subpoena for them. Security camera footage confirms boxes of documents being moved at the time.
That could be seen as a further attempt to prevent the return of the documents, which Trump had no authority to remove from the White House after his presidency ended.
Trump’s legal efforts to derail possible prosecution over stealing classified documents also took a hit when the Supreme Court flatly rejected an effort by Trump to overturn a court order preventing the documents seized from his property being vetted by a judicial officer. The decision means the Department of Justice can continue to compile its case against Trump unimpeded by interference by Trump-appointed judges in lower courts.
If Trump is prosecuted on the most open-and-shut case of his criminality, his theft of documents, it will make for a rich irony. Trump, along with many Republicans, made much of fictitious claims of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state mishandling classified documents. And Trump as president signed into law a bill dramatically increasing the penalty for mishandling documents to five years’ imprisonment.
