Donald Trump’s response to the House January 6 select committee’s authorisation of a subpoena compelling the ex-president to produce documents and give evidence does not say whether he would comply with the committee’s demands.
In a 14-page document addressed to select committee chairman Bennie Thompson and topped with the official seal of Mr Trump’s government-funded post-presidential office, the twice-impeached ex-president instead attacked the panel’s legitimacy as he rattled off a now-familiar litany of grievances and conspiracy theories regarding the election he lost nearly two years ago. Four of the pages contain text, followed by 10 with images.
After calling the 2020 election “rigged and stolen,” Mr Trump accused the panel of being composed from “highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots, whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination”.
He also writes that the “memo” he has sent to Mr Thompson has been written “to express our anger, disappointment, and complaint that with all of the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on what many consider to be a Charade and Witch Hunt”.
The ex-president’s missive continues for three more pages with a laundry list of debunked claims he and his allies first began to repeat in the immediate wake of his loss to Joe Biden, along with complaints about what he describes as a “two-tier system of justice” — a shorthand he frequently employs when complaining about law enforcement conducting legitimate criminal investigations into him or his allies but failing to investigate or arrest his political opponents for alleged offenses.
It then concludes with a list of similarly-debunked claims about how the 2020 election was conducted in multiple swing states. And while Mr Trump does not say whether he’d testify before the panel, he does offer to “present” what he describes as “additional numbers” documenting his false election fraud claims.
Mr Trump’s response comes less than 24 hours after the House January 6 select committee voted unanimously to authorize its’ chairman to issue a subpoena compelling the ex-president to produce documents and give evidence before the panel.
Speaking at the end of the select committee’s ninth investigative hearing — most likely the final such session before the November midterm elections — Mr Thompson called Mr Trump “the one person at the centre of the story of what happened on January 6” and said the panel needs to hear from him in a way that goes “beyond” the fact-finding it has engaged in over the past year.
Mr Thompson also said Mr Trump is “required to answer” to the police officers who “who put their lives and bodies on the line to defend our democracy” against the riotous mob the ex-president sent to the Capitol that day, and to “those millions of Americans whose votes he wanted to throw out as part of his scheme to remain in power”.
“This committee will demand a full accounting to every American person of the event of January 6. So it is our obligation to seek Donald Trump's testimony,” he said.
The twice-impeached former president initially made it known to associates that he might forgo challenging the subpoena and choose to appear if his testimony were aired live on television. But a committee spokesperson did not respond to The Independent when asked if the panel would be amenable to such offer.
