A video of then-President Donald Trump speaking is displayed as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing, Washington, D.C., Oct. 13.
Photo:
Alex Wong/Associated Press
The House Jan. 6 committee voted 9-0 on Thursday to subpoena former President Trump, but the clock is ticking. If Republicans take the House, they’ll shut down the inquiry posthaste in early January. If he wants to avoid the hot seat, Mr. Trump only needs to find a way to resist the subpoena until then.
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Rep.
Liz Cheney
justified an extraordinary subpoena to a former President by saying that “more than 30 witnesses in our investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.” They include
John Eastman,
who told Mr. Trump that Vice President
Mike Pence
could derail the Electoral College count, as well as
Jeffrey Clark,
who tried to get the Justice Department to legitimize dubious fraud claims.
White House Chief of Staff
Mark Meadows
has refused to testify. Outside adviser
Steve Bannon
also refused and was convicted of contempt of Congress, for which he’ll soon be sentenced.
Getting direct evidence of Mr. Trump’s action—and inaction—was always going to be a challenge. There is no evidence so far that Mr. Trump was communicating or coordinating with the Proud Boys or other nefarious elements in the runup to Jan. 6. On Thursday the committee played video of foolish talk by
Roger Stone,
another Trump flunkie who also took the Fifth. “I say f— the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” Mr. Stone said on Nov. 2, which was the day before the election.
What the committee has accomplished, however, is to cement the facts surrounding Mr. Trump’s recklessness after Nov. 3 and his dereliction of duty on Jan. 6. The Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s own campaign repeatedly told him that his fraud claims were without basis. Whether it was willful blindness or an intentional strategy, he kept repeating them.
In testimony played Thursday, former White House Communications Director
Alyssa Farah Griffin
said that about a week after
Joe Biden
was declared the winner, “I popped into the Oval just to, like, 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 effing guy?’” Yet Mr. Trump still pressured Mr. Pence to stop the Electoral College count, while calling for a Jan. 6 rally that he tweeted “will be wild!”
That day he riled up the crowd and urged it to march on the Capitol. Mr. Trump allegedly intended to go there himself, if the Secret Service hadn’t refused. Then he watched the riot on TV. Another striking video Thursday was a question the committee put to his White House counsel,
Pat Cipollone
: “When you were in the dining room in these discussions, was the violence at the Capitol visible on the screen, on the television?” His reply: “Yes.”
Committee members said Thursday they will write a report summarizing their findings. Transcripts of the testimony ought to be released at the same time, so that posterity can see what Mr. Cipollone and others said in full. Ditto for the documents gathered. The committee’s credibility has suffered without GOP cross-examination of the witnesses. And the way that the committee selectively leaked
Ginni Thomas’s
text messages was outrageous, and appeared to be an effort to discredit her husband, Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas.
The Jan. 6 committee probably won’t get Mr. Trump under oath, but the evidence of his bad behavior is now so convincing that political accountability hardly requires it.
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Appeared in the October 14, 2022, print edition as ‘What the Jan. 6 Inquiry Accomplished.’
