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The Jan. 6 Committee voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump during its final hearing on Thursday. “He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on Jan. 6,” Chairman Bennie Thompson said. “So we want to hear from him.”
The subpoena, which is expected to be issued next week, is for both documents and testimony.
Thompson added that the move to subpoena the former president “goes beyond our fact-finding” and that it “is a question about accountability to the American people. He must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions.”
NBC News first reported earlier on Thursday that the panel planned to vote to subpoena Trump.
The news came in the midst of the committee’s first hearing since an extended hiatus this summer. Committee Chair Liz Cheney opened the hearing by declaring that “the vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of January 6th was one man, Donald Trump.”
Cheney went on to say that the organizers of Jan. 6, not just the “foot soldiers” who entered the Capitol, needed to be held accountable for the violence.
The committee dedicated an extensive amount of time to detailing the former president’s preemptive plans to declare Trump the victor of the 2020 election, regardless of the outcome of the votes. In one clip displayed by the committee, Trump advisor Steve Bannon tells a group of allies that their strategy is to simply declare Trump the winner. “When you wake up Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a firestorm,” he said, adding that if “Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier. He’s going to sit right there and say they stole it.”
It goes without saying that Trump would be a key witness in the panel’s investigation. They’re now going to ask him cooperate with the committee.
