Jan. 6 committee has voted to subpoena Trump

The House Jan. 6 committee just wrapped up what could be the final hearing about its U.S. Capitol insurrection investigation.

Cheney says the American people are entitled to answers from Trump

Calling for the Jan. 6 committee to subpoena former President Donald Trump, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R- Wyo., said the last task for the panel is to hold him accountable.

She said the committee has gathered sufficient information to answer questions from Congress and to hold criminals accountable for their actions. However, the committee and the American people still have questions about what happened.

Cheney said that over 30 witnesses invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Some of Trump’s key allies -- Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman and others -- refused to answer questions about their correspondence with the former president on the day before and the day of the attacks on the Capitol.

Ultimately, she said, the American people are entitled to answers from the former president.

“At some point, the Department of Justice may well unearth the facts that these and other witnesses are currently concealing, but our duty today is to our country and our children and our Constitution,” Cheney said. “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion, and every American is entitled to those answers so we can act now to protect our republic.”

Cheney called for the committee to subpoena Trump for relevant documents and testimony, which passed unanimously.

Trump has dodged a subpoena before (in an unrelated case)

The Jan. 6 panel closed today’s hearing by voting unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump.

Presidential subpoenas are complicated, though not unprecedented. They have been known to raise complicated questions about the extent to which a president can be compelled to testify in a legal case. In fact, this particular subpoena vote has been the subject of debate because committee members worry Trump would ignore it and set off a lengthy legal battle.

And that wouldn’t be unprecedented, either.

In April of this year, a New York judge held Trump in contempt of court for not complying with a civil subpoena for documents that the state attorney general had issued as part of an investigation into Trump’s business practices.

The judge ordered Trump to pay a fine of $10,000 per day until he turned over the records, in the hopes that it would “coerce compliance.”

The judge agreed in May to lift the contempt order if Trump paid the requisite fines and submitted affidavits explaining his and his company’s document retention policies and efforts to find those records.

Trump paid $110,000. CNN reported in June that he was no longer in contempt of court.

Trump didn’t try to stop the mob

President Donald Trump failed to take action to stop the Jan. 6 mob from storming the U.S. Capitol. Instead, he sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, adding fuel to the fire.

House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R- Calif., said in January 2021 that Trump had responsibility to bear for the attack on the Capitol because the president failed to intervene. “He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding,” McCarthy said in a video clip.

Instead of calling for the rioters to stop, Trump attacked then Pence over social media.

“The impact of that tweet was foreseeable and predictable. It further inflamed the mob which was chanting, ‘hang Mike Pence’ and provoked them to even greater violence,” committee member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said. “This deliberate decision to further enrage the mob against Vice President Pence cannot be justified by anything that President Trump might have thought about the election.”

Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump

Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney made the motion to vote on former President Donald Trump’s subpoena to testify, describing Trump’s testimony as an obligation given that more than 30 witnesses in the investigation invoked the Fifth Amendment in answer to the committee’s questions about Trump.

All nine members of the committee voted in favor of the motion.

New footage shows congressional leaders scrambling for security help

In new video footage shown by the committee, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is shown talking on the phone to then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam about whether he could send help to the Capitol.

Pelosi can be seen insisting that the government must continue to function and elect a president.

“Do you believe this?” she can be heard saying.

Other footage showed congressional leaders — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Steve Scalise — in secure locations working the phones to ensure their colleagues were safe. Snippets of them huddled around cell phones are interspersed with tense scenes of the rioters chanting outside.

At one point, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sit on a bench talking to Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen on speakerphone, calmly acknowledging that rioters are ransacking their officers and expressing concerns about their personal safety.

Schumer asks Rosen to issue a public statement, in his capacity as a law enforcement officer, asking the rioters to leave.

“They’re breaking the law in many different ways,” Pelosi says. “And quite frankly, much of it at the instigation of the president of the United States.”

Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany tweeted that the footage was shot by Alexandra Pelosi — a documentary filmmaker — who was with her mother to capture footage of the historic day.

Secret Service had concerns about Pence’s safety after Trump’s tweet, committee says

The Secret Service communicated concern about Vice President Mike Pence’s safety following a tweet from President Donald Trump, the Jan. 6 committee said.

New documents from the Secret Service show that after Trump tweeted about Pence, an agent warned “POTUS just tweeted about Pence. Probably not going to be good for Pence.” Another agent remarked that there were 24,000 likes on the tweet in under two minutes.

A former Twitter employee testified to the committee and said on the insurrectionists, “they were literally calling for assassination” as Trump’s tweet on Pence went out.

Trump watched the insurrection for nearly 3 hours from White House dining room, committee says

President Donald Trump resisted advice from his advisers to speak up and send a message to his supporters to stop the violence at the Capitol after they had already stormed the building, the Jan. 6 committee said.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said that from 1:20 p.m. to about 4 p.m. on Jan. 6, Trump watched television coverage of the insurrection unfolding from the White House dining room off the Oval Office. He ignored advisers and others, including Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who urged him to make a statement to stop the violence.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she overheard White House chief of staff Mark Meadows saying that Trump didn’t want to do anything because “he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong,” referring to the protesters.

Trump knew the crowd was armed and dangerous

Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said it was important to understand the lengths the former president was willing to go to stay in power, including allowing armed protestors to walk to the Capitol.

Former White House aid Cassidy Hutchinson said in her testimony that she overheard a conversation in which Trump demanded security at his rally stop searching for weapons.

“They’re not here to hurt me, take the f*****g mags away, let my people in, they can march to the Capitol from here, let the people away,” Hutchinson recalled Trump saying.

The committee’s investigation found emails that circulated among the intelligence community that showed messages from rallygoers pushing for violence, including orders about carrying weapons and ammunition.

“What is clear from this record is that the White House had more than enough warning to warrant stopping any plan for an Ellipse rally and certainly for stopping any march to the Capitol, and as evidence from our prior hearings suggested, the president was aware of this information,” Aguilar said.

Despite knowing that crowd members were armed, Trump still urged security to allow the mob to move to the Capitol. “There’s no scenario where that action is benign and there is no scenario where an American president should have been engaged in that conduct.’ Aguilar said. " ... This could not be justified on any basis for any reason.”

Trump pressured former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results

On the morning of Jan. 6, former President Donald Trump called then-Vice President Mike Pence and demanded he overturned the election results, Rep Stephanie Murphy, D- Fla., said.

“President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election, but President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said in a video recorded during a speech at the conservative Federalist Society in February. “The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone, and frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”

An email from Trump lawyer John Eastman showed that the former president knew before Jan. 6, that it would be illegal for Pence to overturn the election, breaking the Electoral Count Act. Eastman admitted that he had advised Trump that Pence did not have the power to decide what electoral votes did or did not count.

The Secret Service had tips and other evidence that violence would happen on Jan. 6, committee says

The Secret Service had advance notice that there was going to be potential violence on Jan. 6, 2021, Rep. Adam Schiff said.

Schiff said that on Dec. 31, 2020, agents had sent out intelligence reports that Trump supporters had plans to occupy Capitol Hill. On Jan. 5, 2021, the Secret Service flagged a social media account that said someone threatened to bring a sniper rifle to a rally the following day, the committee said.

“By the morning of Jan. 6, it was clear that the Secret Service anticipated violence,” Schiff said, reading out chats from a Secret Service division where one agent said that morning felt like the “calm before the storm.”

Schiff said federal agents knew, even before Trump began his remarks, that the crowd had weapons and had the intention of going toward the Capitol. He also said Trump advisers were aware of threats of violence.

In a text from Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, Miller said, “I GOT THE BASE FIRED UP,” and sent a link to a webpage that had violence comments about Jan. 6.

One of those comments said: “Our lawmakers in Congress can leave one of two ways. One, in a body bag. Two, after rightfully certifying Trump the winner.”

Schiff said Miller claims he had no idea about these comments when he sent the link to Meadows.

Committee will vote today to subpoena Trump

A source familiar with the process tells NPR’s Deirdre Walsh that the Jan. 6 committee plans to vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify and continue its investigation.

The issue of whether to subpoena Trump has been debated inside the committee, with some members concerned that the former president would ignore the subpoena, leading to a lengthy litigation process that’d involve complex questions about the separation of powers.

None of that is likely to be wrapped up ahead of midterms or the start of a new congress, and most of these committee members are up for re-election.

What we know about the deleted Secret Service texts

Rep. Adam Schiff said at today’s hearing that the committee was able to obtain nearly 1 million emails, records and other electronic records from the U.S. Secret Service that shed light on what happened during and before the Capitol riot.

The inspector general for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, found in July that the Secret Service deleted many of the text messages sent during a two-day period surrounding Jan. 6.

Those texts were deleted even after the watchdog had asked for records of them as part of its investigation into the events of that day, the inspector general’s office said.

The Secret Service’s communications chief disputed that characterization, saying the agency had started to reset its mobile phones in January 2021as part of a months-long system migration plan and that the messages weren’t requested until the following month.

NPR’s Claudia Grisales recently reported on the mass exodus of lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog agency, which you can read about here.

Schiff said at today’s hearing that the committee’s review of “hundreds of thousands of pages” provided by the Secret Service continues.

Committee member says Trump repeated election lies about suitcases of ballots, even though he knew there was no fraud

Donald Trump was fixated on repeating the lie that there were suitcases of ballots that contributed to widespread election fraud, despite multiple advisers telling him there were no suitcases and there was no fraud, a Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee said.

Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., said Trump continued to make these false claims, even though they were “directly at odds with what Donald Trump knew.”

Trump “maliciously repeated this nonsense to a wide audience over and over again. His intent was to deceive,” Luria said.

After Trump tried to pressure state election officials in Georgia to change the election results, he tried to appoint Jeff Clark as attorney general. The only reason that did not happen, Luria said, was because several White House and Justice Department officials threatened to resign.

How many election-related lawsuits did Trump lose? A look at the numbers

There isn’t one exact count of lawsuits filed by former President Donald Trump after the 2020 election, though there are some numbers that keep coming up.

Trump and his allies filed 62 suits in states and federal courts seeking to overturn election results in states that he had lost, according to Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. All but one failed, he says. (USA Today offers this analysis by the numbers).

But Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Brookings Institution, wanted a more granular look at the data. He combed through cases listed on Elias’ tracker, as well as Ballotpedia and Wikipedia (so again, a grain of salt is needed).

Ultimately, Wheeler examined 194 judicial votes in 42 post-election cases: 29 state cases with 150 votes by 75 judges, and 13 federal cases with 44 votes by 41 judges.

“I coded these votes by a simple binary measure — Trump won, or Trump lost,” Wheeler explains. “For sure, a judge’s decision — many involved jurisdictional or procedural questions — is not necessarily an indication of the judge’s view of Trump’s basic claim of election fraud.”

Committee says Trump admitted in private that he lost the 2020 election

Testimony from former White House aides, including Communications Director Alyssa Farah, shows that former President Donald Trump acknowledged in private that he lost the election — despite making baseless claims in public that there was election fraud.

“I popped into the Oval just to give the president the headlines and see how he was doing. And he was looking at the TV and he said, ‘Can you believe I lost to this f***ing guy?’ " Farah said in her testimony.

The committee also said that the former president issued an immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan, which would take place before Biden’s inauguration, despite military officials advising otherwise. The order was signed but was never carried out. The committee says this was evidence that Trump knew he had lost the election.

Steve Bannon will be sentenced next week on contempt of Congress charges

The committee has played tape of former Trump presidential adviser Steve Bannon speaking to associates about Trump’s plan to declare victory even before results came in, adding at one point that “if Biden’s winning, Trump is gonna do some crazy s***.”

After playing the tape Rep. Zoe Lofgren noted that Bannon has refused to testify before the committee.

A federal jury convicted Bannon of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for defying the committee’s subpoena. He put on no defense in the case, which you can read more about here. He faces the prospect of jail time and monetary fines when he is sentenced on Oct. 21.

It’s not Bannon’s only legal woe. In early September, he was indicted on six charges under New York state law, including conspiracy and money laundering, on charges of diverting funds donated to the We Build the Wall organization. He pleaded not guilty.

Steve Bannon knew Trump would declare victory

Steve Bannon knew in advance that Trump would declare victory at the end of election night, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

A video clip during the hearing showed Bannon saying, “What Trump’s going to do is declare victory ... but that doesn’t mean he’s a winner, he’s going to say he’s a winner.”

Lofgren went on to say that Bannon, currently being held in contempt of Congress and awaiting trial, knew that there would be an attack during the election certification on Jan. 6.”All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Bannon said on Jan. 5. “It’s all converging, and it’s at ... the point of attack, tomorrow.”

Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney says another Jan. 6 could happen without accountability

Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in her opening remarks that another attack like Jan. 6 could happen again “if we do not take necessary action to prevent it.”

“Without accountability, it all becomes normal and will recur,” Cheney said.

Cheney said Trump was the “central cause” of the insurrection and was “personally and substantially involved in all of it.” The hearing today, she said, will focus on Trump’s state of mind and intentions.

Cheney said in her statement that the committee may decide to make a “series of criminal referrals” to the Department of Justice, but she reiterated that it is not the committee’s role to make decisions regarding prosecutions.

Chairman Bennie Thompson’s opening remarks

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson began the proceedings by reiterating that the committee has found overwhelming evidence that the attack on Jan. 6 was part of a multi-part plan by former President Trump.

Trump knew that he had lost the election, but took the matter to court, where he lost time and time again. When that didn’t work, the former president “pulled out all the stops to stay in power,” Thompson said.

“In a staggering betrayal of his oath, Donald Trump attempted a plan that led to an attack on a pillar of our democracy; it’s still hard to believe.”

Thompson went on to say that the investigation was not about politics or party, but instead to find the facts about what unfolded on Jan. 6., and to ensure that “our government functions under the rule of law, as our constitution demands.”

Chairman Thompson says the committee hasn’t ruled out a subpoena for Trump

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson spoke briefly with reporters, including NPR’s Lexie Schapitl, before heading into the hearing room.

Thompson said the committee has “not ruled out a subpoena” for former President Donald Trump and is still considering hearing directly from former Vice President Mike Pence as well.

Thompson also added that the committee will put out “some work” before the midterms but stopped short of committing to an interim report.

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