The legislative committee investigating the assault on the Capitol of January 6, 2021 voted this Thursday in favor of subpoenaing former United States President Donald
Trump (2017-2021), who gave few signs that he will cooperate.
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In a unanimous vote, the nine legislators of that committee of the Lower House approved summoning Trump, the most popular leader among Republicans, to offer his testimony and deliver documents.
“Trump must be held accountable … he needs to answer to the millions of Americans whose votes he tried to throw away in order to stay in power,” said the committee’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson.
The decision comes less than a month before the mid-term elections in the US, on November 8, when a third of the seats in the Senate and the entire House of Representatives will be renewed. Both chambers are currently in the hands of Democrats.
The summons, which now has to be issued by the committee, assumes that Trump will have to appear to answer under oath to the questions of the legislators and has an expiration date of January 3, 2023, when the new Congress will be installed, with which the former president would have until that day to appear once the panel issues said summons.
Will Trump show up?
Trump’s reaction was immediate and shortly after the vote he attacked the committee in several messages on his social network, Truth Social.
Specifically, he accused the legislative panel of not “knowingly” investigating the “massive” electoral fraud that he claims without evidence that it occurred in the 2020 presidential election, when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, the current president.
Without giving much indication that he will collaborate with that committee, Trump said that the reason for the assault on Capitol Hill was that alleged electoral fraud, which contradicts the findings of the legislative panel that this Thursday studied evidence that incriminates the former president.
In fact, that commission voted to summon him after holding his ninth public hearing, where legislators presented evidence, including testimony and emails, to show that the former president deliberately rejected the results of the 2020 elections.
After Thursday’s session, the committee could announce the conclusion of its work or set a new hearing, and it is expected that it will present a final report at the end of this year.
On January 6, 2021, some 10,000 people, most of them Trump supporters, demonstrated in front of the Capitol and about 800 stormed the building while Biden’s electoral victory was ratified.There were five deaths and some 140 officers injured.
Speaking to reporters after the committee session, Thompson expressed hope that Trump would agree to appear. “If we manage to get him to attend to us, fine, and if not, we will continue with the evidence we have collected,” said the committee president, who did not specify what the next step would be.
Asked if the committee could bring the former president to justice if he refuses to appear, Thompson simply said: “We’ll see what happens.” It is not the first time that a subpoena has been issued for a former president to produce documents or offer his testimony, although it is not clear to what extent he would be obliged to testify.
In fact, members of the legislative committee themselves have debated whether or not to issue this subpoena in the face of the possibility that Trump will ignore it and open a legal battle.
In his case, it would not be the first time because last April a New York judge declared him in contempt for not obeying a summons to deliver documents to the attorney general of that state as part of an investigation into his companies.
Finally, the contempt statement was lifted after
Trump will pay a $110,000 fine.
Setback for Trump
Beyond the summons from the committee, this has not been the only setback suffered by the former president this Thursday after the country’s Supreme Court rejected an emergency request by his lawyers to intervene in the case of the documents that the FBI seized at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
The highest judicial instance of the United States rejected Trump’s request for a third party, an independent expert, to review the hundred documents marked as classified, of the more than 11,000 that the FBI seized during the Mar-a- Lake last August 8.
During their search, the FBI found classified and secret documents that
Trump reportedly took it with him when he left the White House in January 2021.
Last Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to deny Trump’s request, considering the documents found in his residence as “extraordinarily sensitive.”
EFE
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